A Political Biography Of Thomas Paine. W. A. SPECK. xv & 258pp. Hardbound. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2013. ISBN 13: 9781848930957. £60.00 

For anyone interested in the life and influence of Thomas Paine the appearance of a new biography of him is to be warmly welcomed. Naturally it invites comparison with previous biographical studies, in particular the most recent. It bears out well in relationship to them. What stands out in this new work is its detailed coverage of Paine’s career and his comprehensive treatment of the controversies and issues Paine addressed. 

The author draws attention to the problems encountered by biographers due to the gaps in surviving information about Paine’s early life. To some extent he fills some of these gaps, particularly when it comes to Paine’s years in Lewes, in doing this he has drawn on the research undertaken by a retired excise officer of George Hindmarch, though not uncritically, though approvingly citing his contention that there was no such thing as the Headstrong Club, and that Paine had adopted republicanism – “even revolutionary” views as a consequence of his involvement. Professor Speck’s examination of the years Paine spent in Lewes bring out clearly that further research might well pay dividends. A more plausible explanation for Paine’s conversion to republicanism could have been a degree of resentment at the rejection of his Case of the Officers of Excise, over which he had laboured long and hard, and eventually lost his post with the Excise. His resentment, could well have made him more receptive to republicanism when after moving to the American colonies and there became aware of the discontent amongst the colonists to British government policies in respect of the colonies. His final conversion may well have been events at Lexington and Concord, which prompted Paine to write of rejecting ‘the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England for ever’. I would have liked to see Professor Speck go into the subject in detail. Whatever, Common Sense became not just a rallying point for the colonists but an exposition of republicanism that had an influence internationally. Yet for all his unqualified republicanism he was to oppose the execution of the deposed French king – at his personal cost, and would, but for an accident, or was it?, followed the king to the guillotine. 

Professor Speck refers to Paine’s ability to express himself in a manner readily understood by his targeted readership, artisans, small tradesmen, apprentices and others, an ability that was to alarm the political and religious establishments in England following the publication of Rights of Man which had achieved record sales. Previous Paine biographers have accepted the claim that the first biography of him, written by George Chalmers, who concealed his authorship under the name “Francis Oldys”, which appeared in 1791, had been commissioned and paid by the government, for whom he worked, however, Professor Speck questions the validity of this, and notes that given Chalmers political views [he had fled from the colonies following the outbreak of the revolution] he may have taken it on himself to denounce Paine. The fact that he had access to official papers, as chief clerk to the committee of the Privy Council, he would have had this. 

An example, not cited by Speck, of the alarm generated first by Rights of Man and then by The Age of Reason, can be found in a missive addressed to his clergy by the bishop of London, Beilby Porteus. Writing specifically of Paine’s works he refers to “the meanness of their style, and the homeliness, the plainness, and the gross familiarity of their manner, are all too well adapted to the taste and apprehension of those readers whom they are meant to captivate. This”, he goes on, “is a new (his emphasis) species of infidel writing, recently introduced among us. Hitherto we have had to contend with the Tolands, the Tindals, the Bolingbrokes, and the Humes of the age; men, whose writings could fall only into the hands of a few in the higher ranks of life, and were not likely to make much impression on well- informed and well cultivated minds. But the pieces to which I allude [Rights of Man and The Age of Reason] are addressed to the multitude (again his emphasis), and are most dexterously brought down to the level of their understanding”. He continues in a similar vein calling Paine’s works, “most artful snares” (Beilby Porteus. Tracts on Various Subjects. London, Cadell & Davies, 1807. pp.276-278). 

Ironically, having roundly condemned Paine’s style of writing he called upon his clergy to emulate it in both their writing and sermonising. Perhaps aware they could not, or would not, in 1792 he begged Hannah More to write something in simple words to open the eyes of uneducated people dazed by the words “liberty” and “equality”. Initially she had refused but then agreed, writing her tract, Village Politics, supposedly about a discussion between a country carpenter Will Chip, who was happy with his inferior social status and defended the political and social status quo, and a supporter of Paine’s ideas, who, naturally, ended up agreeing with Chip. This tract is briefly discussed by Professor Speck. 

A Political Biography of Thomas Paine must surely become one of the most important of Paine biographies and deserves a wide readership. It is a detailed overview of Paine’s life and career presented in varying degrees of detail, and written in what is a very readable, almost Paineite style. As well as its nine chapters on Paine and the disputes he became involved in through his writings, many of which retain their relevance and could apply to events and situations today given some minor changes, it also has thirty-four pages of notes, an extensive bibliography and a useful index. One error I noted, the reference to Paine’s Jewish critic David Levi, as being an American, whereas he was English, being by profession a hat-maker turned printer. 

A Political Biography of Thomas Paine is a comprehensive and thoughtful work that deserves to be not only in academic libraries but also those of anyone seriously interested in Thomas Paine. However, its high price is regrettably likely to put it beyond the reach of many students, though the Historical Association has just published an essay on Paine by Professor Speck. Priced at £2.99 it is at the time of writing restricted to Kindle, but hopefully the association will publish it in pamphlet form. 

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2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest works of modern British history, E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. While a celebration of the emergence of collective class consciousness, this magnificent study is not without key personalities and individual inspirational figures, not least Thomas Paine of Thetford, an inveterate pamphleteer and veritable ‘citizen of the world’. 

Paine is the key individual catalyst instigating Thompson’s narrative. It was his great gift for communication his ‘intellectual vernacular prose’ – which broke through the elite and gentlemanly conventions of 18th political debate to render the message of natural rights and rational republicanism accessible to ‘members unlimited’, the strapline of the new Corresponding Societies of the 1790s (whose membership extended to those designated by Edmund Burke, Paine’s protagonist, as the ‘swinish multitude’). A great communicator rather than original thinker, it was citizen Paine who opened up the prospect of a new age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) would no longer be denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. 

Thompson’s interpretation underlined Paine’s importance in what was labelled by historians as the ‘Atlantic-Democratic Revolution’. In the 1960s, my undergraduate days, this exercise in comparative history breaking through the constraints of nation state historiography was as fashionable as Thompson’s history from below. In light of events in Syria which have prompted the US to remember France as its ‘oldest ally’, the Atlantic Democratic Revolution might come back into fashion again. 

Paine traversed the Atlantic world, personifying, as it were, the democratic revolution with its universal message, a motif which informed ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’, the alternative national anthem, as it were, of British republicans. Here, for example, are the first and fourth verses: God save great Thomas Paine, 

God save great Thomas Paine, 

His ‘Rights of Man’ explain 

To every soul. 

He makes the blind to see What dupes and slaves they be, 

And points out liberty, 

From pole to pole. Why should despotic pride Usurp on every side? 

Let us be free: 

Grant Freedom’s arms success, 

And all her efforts bless, 

Plant through the universe 

Liberty’s Tree. 

Having been apprenticed to his father’s trade of corset-making, he tried a number of other occupations (most notably serving as an exciseman in Lewes) before sailing for America in 1774, having recently separated from his second wife. Here he made his name with a pamphlet, Common Sense(1776) which, in advocating complete independence for the American colonies, argued for republicanism as the sole rational means of government the mostly widely distributed pamphlet of the American War of Independence, it has the strongest claim, the Dictionary of National Biography notes, to have made independence seem both desirable and attainable to the wavering colonists. Relishing the freedom of the new world (and its potential for commercial progress) Paine readily cast aside the restrictive and gentlemanly conventions of British politics, not least the exclusive tone of Whig ‘republicanism’, a form of ‘civic humanism’, premised on glorified models of classical antiquity and selective memories of seventeenth century constitutional struggles. Far from democratic, ‘republicanism’ of this order accorded political primacy to independent landowners. Guardians of the constitution, it was their duty to resist imbalance and corruption in the polity through civic virtue, by active participation in political affairs. Paine, however, was altogether more democratic and inclusive. Looking beyond the trivia of piecemeal constitutional renovation, he sought an end to executive tyranny and what we would now call ‘sleaze’ through the ‘virtue’ and common good of representative democratic republican government. Hence his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution, by which time he had returned to England. 

His democratic natural rights republicanism reached its most influential expression in his two-part Rights of Man (1791-2), prompted by the need to refute Edmund Burke’s critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was a publication sensation- on the most conservative estimate between 100,000 and 200,000 copies were sold in the first three years after publication. In the frenzied atmosphere of the early 1790s, Paine’s writings rendered a fundamental division between the gentlemanly ‘Friends of the People’ and the plebeian ‘Friends of Liberty’. His insistence on natural – as opposed to historicist or constitutional – rights broke through elite constraints, not least the identification of political rights with property rights. Indeed, his democratic republicanism mediated a genuinely radical value-system, oppositional in all its aspects. In calling for a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution, he sought a decisive break from the conventional ways and means of reformers such as petitioning. Regarded as a highly dangerous figure, he was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest for treason in 1792. Having been accorded honorary French citizenship, he gained election to the French National Convention but ceased to attend after opposing (to some surprise) the execution of Louis XVI and the fall of the Girondins, after which he himself soon fell victim of the Terror. During imprisonment, he began work on his Age of Reason (two parts, 1794-5), an ill- timed deist attack on organized religion. 

Thereafter his fame and fortunes declined. According to most accounts, he died in miserable circumstances in New York in 1809, having spent his last years in America often depressed, drunk and diseased – although some responses to my BBC history piece suggest otherwise. Ken Burchell contacted me from an email address, Paineite@gmail, to inform me that Paine’s financial worth at time of death was in the region of $15,000, that with a consumption of a quart of brandy per week he drank far less than either Washington or Jefferson and that he was no more depressed than any other elderly dying person. The fact is, Mr Burchell insisted, ‘prudish, evangelical, pro-temperance and most of all Federalist writers attacked Paine’s personal character in order to blunt his personal influence … just as they do today’. Paine’s legacy has certainly proved controversial and contested. 

Within my working life as an historian, there has been considerable change. There was a marked decline in his historiographical standing as the radical 1960s receded. By the time of Thatcherite Britain, mainstream historians were dismissing Paine and his autodidact artisan audiences in the Corresponding and radical societies as an insignificant minority, accorded disproportionately tendentious attention by Thompson and other ‘marxisant’ practitioners of ‘history from below’, ideologically predisposed to ignore the beer-swilling, male chauvinist, xenophobic, beer-swilling, flag-waving majority. Furthermore, the historical establishment insisted, ‘Painophobia’ the reaction proved by Paine – proved stronger than the radicalism he excited. Compelled to answer the democratic Jacobin challenge, conservative opponents of reform developed a convincing defence of the existing order: indeed, it was the conservatives who won the unprecedented battle for the popular mind in the 1790s, although here it was conceded that rhetorical strategy and propaganda device took precedence over ideology and intellectual argument. Burke had already set the tone, recapturing the language of nationalism for the conservative cause in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Vindicated by the subsequent course of events in France, Burke’s prescient pronouncements duly confirmed the supremacy of the accumulated wisdom of precedent and prescription over the wild (and un- English) fanaticism of Paineite abstract reason. Two particular aspects of Paine’s un-English fanaticism were seized upon by the conservative spin doctors of the time to telling effect: levelling and infidelism. 

While extolling Paine as a popular communicator, Thompson had also insisted that he provided the programme as well as the language to attract working people to politics. Paine provided the missing link between parliamentary reform and social and economic progress, drawing distressed workers away from spontaneous rioting into organized political agitation. As Thompson saw it, this was the great achievement of Part Two of The Rights of Man, published in February 1792, a volume which confirmed that Paine was much more than a talented populariser of advanced ideas, a megaphone for the enlightenment project against kingcraft, lordcraft and priestcraft. An original thinker far ahead of his time, he sought to redress poverty (seemingly endemic in advanced European societies) through an interventionist programme of welfare redistribution, including old age pensions, marriage allowances and maternity benefits. 

Stopping short of socialism, Paine transformed jurisprudential notions of social obligation the ‘soft’ right to charity into a theory of ‘positive liberty’ the ‘hard’ right to welfare, guaranteed by government and financed by redistributive taxation (a programme expanded in his later pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, 1796). Judged over the long term, Thompson was correct: Paine made a decisive contribution to the politicisation of discontent. At the time, however, it was the misrepresentation of his ideas rather than the inspiration they provided – which mattered more. The charge of ‘levelling’ or economic equality, promptly emerged as the crucial factor in the loyalist triumph over the radicals. Where Burke looked back to gothic feudalism and past glories, loyalist popular propagandists celebrated Britain’s commercial progress, the contemporary wealth of the nation threatened by the spoliation and anarchy of republican egalitarianism. In defending inequality and hierarchy, loyalists stood forward to save Britain from the pre-commercial ‘primitivism’ of natural rights republicanism. 

Paine’s inopportune avowal of deism in his Age of Reason (1794-5) enabled loyalists to add infidelism to the charges of primitivism and levelling. Here the propaganda victory of the loyalists over the godless republican levellers should not be attributed to superior argument but to what sociologists call ‘resource mobilisation’. Where loyalists triumphed was in quantity not quality. Untroubled by the authorities or lack of funds, loyalists deployed every medium and resource to spread the patriotic conservative message in popular and homiletic form among the lower orders, from parish pulpit to national organisation – Reeves Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was the largest political organisation in the country. Many of the corresponding societies fell victim to this conservative onslaught, given physical form by Church and King mobs. The surviving societies judiciously excised the offending Paineite vocabulary of rational republicanism with its alien and revolutionary stigma. The violence directed against the radicals was recorded in the second verse of ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’: 

Thousands cry ‘Church and King’ 

That well deserve to swing, 

All must allow: 

Birmingham blush for shame, 

Manchester do the same, 

Infamous is your name, Patriots vow. 

While radicals struggled to retain a public presence, loyalists chose to treat the crowds to an increasing number of patriotic demonstrations to celebrate royal anniversaries and victories over the French. The success of these free holidays and licensed street festivals at which effigies of Paine were often burnt – was not without irony, as I noted by way of conclusion in my BBC piece. In confronting Paineite democracy through such popular nationalist participation, loyalists had established what the radicals had failed fully to achieve, the extension of politics to a mass public. As subsequent events were to show, this public expressed its loyalty to the nation, not necessarily to the status quo. Patriotism indeed was soon to acquire a radical inflexion, upholding the rights of the freeborn Englishman. 

After the polarization of political rhetoric in the 1790s, the opening decade of the 19th century was a time of considerable flux and confusion as war, patriotism and reform were all reassessed and redefined. Once Napoleon’s imperial ambitions became apparent, the character of the war effort changed. Having previously opposed the war – an aggressive conflict against a neighbouring country which simply wanted to reform its internal system of government – radicals now came forward as ardent patriots at the head of recruiting and volunteering drives. 

Having redefined their role as guardians of national virtue, radicals began to attract a wide audience as a series of scandals suggested a connection between military incompetence and parliamentary corruption. Disaffected loyalists joined the radicals in condemnation of the depredations of the fiscal-military state. Among such converts were William Cobbett, the most prolific and influential radical journalist of the early 19th century, and Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire gentleman farmer turned radical orator. Defiantly independent, these former loyalists injected a mood of impatience and intransigence, insisting on the right of all to engage in constitutional protest, to attend meetings, sign petitions and demand nothing less than universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the ballot. While refusing to compromise their new radical principles in subservience either to the Whigs or to commercial interests, they studiously avoided adherence to Paineite rational republicanism. 

In typically English pragmatic and eclectic manner, natural rights arguments were subsumed or concealed within a patriotic appeal to history and precedent. Major Cartwright devoted a lifetime of study to uncover hallowed Saxon principles and practices of popular sovereignty, an original purity defiled by the ‘Norman Yoke’. Open and inclusive in procedure and programme, the mass platform which emerged after 1815 amidst the transition from war to peace without plenty, deliberately exploited ambiguities in the law and constitution, drawing upon the emotive rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and ‘people’s history’ in demanding restoration of the people’s rights. Radicals proudly claimed descent from ‘that patriotic band who broke the ruffian arm of arbitrary power, and dyed the field and scaffold with their pure and precious blood, for the liberties of the country’. The appeal to the rights of the freeborn Englishman was perhaps best expressed in poetic form: 

Shall Englishmen o’ercome each foe 

And now at home those rights forgo 

Enjoy’d by none beside? 

Degenerate race! Ah! then in vain 

Your birthrights sacred to maintain 

HAMPDEN and SYDNEY died! 

The great hero of the mass platform and advocate of ‘the cause of truth’, Orator Hunt was hailed in the north of England as ‘the intrepid champion of the people’s rights’. ‘The good old character of an independent country Gentleman was surely there in him’, a correspondent wrote to the Manchester Observer. 

I had almost compared him to an English Baron in the time of Magna Charta, but that Mr Hunt’s motives were so much more praiseworthy: he was not there as they met that worthless King at Runnimede, to advocate the rights of a few, but of all. 

Mobilised by Hunt, those without the political nation stood forward to demand radical reform in open constitutional manner and in Sunday best clothes, relying on the proud and disciplined display of numbers (marshalled by demobilised ex-servicemen) to coerce the otherwise inexorable government ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must. The popular format introduced by Hunt constitutional mass pressure from without for the constitutional democratic rights of all continued to inform radical agitation throughout the age of the Chartists. Radicals – renovators as they were initially called – looked to the mass petitioning platform to reclaim their rights, ignoring Paine’s key tactical prescription of a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution. 

My work on Hunt and the mass platform thus led me to question Thompson’s claims about Paine and his breakthrough language of universal rational republicanism. As my research demonstrated, natural rights republicanism and conventions of the type prescribed by Paine did not feature in early 19th century radicalism. Instead, the crowds rallied to a populist platform of mass petitioning justified by history, the constitution and the rule of law, a potent blend of patriotic and national notions. While querying Thompson on the language of radicalism, I am not seeking to belittle Paine. Like Thompson, I recognise him as a seminal influence in English radicalism, the inspirational figure in the politicization of discontent. As Thompson noted, it was Paine who supplied the missing link, underlining the importance of politics to those enduring economic hardship. Thanks to Paine, spontaneous, backward-looking rioting was steadily replaced by forward-looking political agitation, a great advance which William Cobbett opined, the nation should acknowledge. 

The implacable opponent of ‘Old Corruption’, Cobbett gained much of his political education about The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance from Paine’s critical insights into the operation of the ‘system’ (or ‘the Thing’ as Cobbett himself called it) which produced lucrative profits for political peculators and financial speculators at the expense of an intolerable and demand-stifling tax burden on the poor. To honour his mentor, Cobbett reclaimed Paine’s bones from their American grave and brought them back to England (they have since disappeared). 

Educated by Paine, later by Cobbett, 19th century radicals persisted in explaining inequality and exploitation in political terms even as the industrial revolution continued apace. Just as the war-inflated ‘funding system’ had been built on the base of political monopoly so it was political power that underpinned the capitalist system and denied the worker the right to the whole produce of his labour. The ranks of radical demonology grew throughout the age of the Chartists: alongside fundholders, sinecurists, pensioners and other tax-gorgers, there now sat cotton lords, millocrats (note the significant political terminology) and other capitalists, parasitic middlemen whose privileged and tyrannical position of unequal exchange stemmed from their monopoly of political and legal power. Whether directed against tax- eaters and/or capitalists, the radical demand was always the same: an end to the system which left labour alone unprotected and at the mercy of those who monopolized the state and the law. 

Paine’s influence was thus fundamental, albeit not in the way that we might suppose. There were periodic attempts to impose his rational republican formula in purist form, by those disillusioned by the cyclical pattern of mobilisation and collapse of the mass platform, with its vacillating crowds, blustering orators and populist idioms. One such was Richard Carlile, an incorruptible Paineite ideologue who in the aftermath of Peterloo and the collapse of the post-war mass platform subjected himself to a regime of ideological purification and physical Puritanism with comprehensive counter- cultural rigour. A trenchant critic of the empty bluster and personalized style of Hunt’s ‘charismatic’ leadership, Carlile subsequently displayed the worst faults of an ‘ideological’ leader, provoking innumerable schisms among the votaries with his dictatorial pronouncements on doctrine, so different in tone from the eclectic and undogmatic nature of popular radical argument. He insisted on strict conformity to the infidel-Republican Paineite formulary, the exegesis of which (at different times desist, atheist and spiritualist) he reserved for himself alone. In this intensely sectarian and ideological form, rational republicanism failed to engage with the general gut republicanism — the irreverence, scepticism and anti-authoritarianism — which often ran deep in working-class culture. 

No longer committed to the platform, mass agitation and volatile crowds, Carlile looked to the freedom of the press to promote the ‘march of infidelity’, the progress of scientific materialism against superstition, myth and ignorance, but here he found himself in unwelcome alliance with commercial pornographers and the like. Unlike the pornographers, however, Carlile and his ‘corps’ of supporters were libertarians not libertines. In the sanctity of their ‘temples of reason’, these votaries of Paineite republicanism, ‘zetetics’ as they were called, advocated contraception, female equality and free love, a programme of sexual radicalism articulated in the language of the liberal Enlightenment, of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Infidel, republican and sexual radical, Carlile, the doctrinaire individualist, was also the proselyte of orthodox political economy. His pioneer advocacy of birth control was motivated by Malthusianism as much as by feminism, by his conviction that distress was caused by the people themselves through bad and improvident habits and the ‘excess of their numbers in relation to the supply of labour that can employ them’. ‘You cannot be free, you can find no reform, until you begin it with yourselves… abstain from gin and the gin-shop, from gospel and the gospel-shop, from sin and silly salvation’. By the end of the 1820s Carlile stood widely divorced from popular radicalism, culture and experience, a lone opponent of collective endeavour. Interpreted – or rather misinterpreted in this way, Paine plays no part in the making of the English working class. 

Eschewing ideological schisms and the like, mainstream popular radicals never denied the inspiration provided by ‘immortal’ Thomas Paine, but they ensured that his memory was preserved within a patriotic pantheon in which the universal rights of man were subsumed within the historic and constitutional rights of the freeborn Englishman, the charter of the land. The citizens of the world was honoured as British patriot.

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A letter written and signed by Thomas Paine in in July 1789 was sold by auction in June 2010 the second paragraph of which reads: 

“My grandmothers’ maiden name was Hustler. She intermarried with Mr. Cocke and attorney and Deputy recorder of the Borough of Thetford in Norfolk, – my other, who is still living, and Mr. Devereux Hustler of Hessett near Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk were Brother’s and Sister’s Children – I always understood that the family of the Hustler’s came many years before from Yorkshire. 

I have researched the Hustler family as I live in a farmhouse in Drinkstone, Suffolk, owned around 1815 by Thomas Devereux Hustler, grandson of Devereux Hustler of Hessett, referred to by Thomas Paine. The wills of Samuel Hustler (1705) and his wife Dorothy (1714) establish that they were the parents of Devereux (born ca. 1701). So it follows that Samuel Hustler had a sister who was Thomas Paine’s grandmother. The will of Thomas Hustler of Bury St. Edmunds (1688) confirms that he is the father of Samuel and that he also had two sons, Charles and Thomas, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Frances. The parish records of St. Mary’s Church, Bury St. Edmunds provide the baptisms of the children, excluding Elizabeth whose baptism has yet to be found. 

There was a further son, Henry, baptised on 10 April 1682 and buried a few days later on 21 April, 1682. One of the daughters, either Elizabeth or Frances, was therefore Thomas Paine’s grandmother and, though we have no record of the marriage of a Miss Hustler to Thomas Cocke to prove which daughter it was, I strongly suspect it was Frances with Thomas Paine’s mother being named after her mother. The marriage of Frances or Elizabeth Hustler to Thomas Cocke does not appear to have taken place in Bury St. Edmunds and is still to be found. 

The baptismal records for Samuel, Frances, Charles and Henry refer to the mother as Elizabeth. Clearly then, she is the mother of them all. She died in 1683 (buried 24 March at St. Mary’s). There is a suggestion that she was Elizabeth Maxey. Thomas must have remarried as he refers to his dear and loving wife Abigail in his will. Thomas Hustler died in 1688 and his burial record at St. Mary’s on 18 December 1688, reads Thomas Hustler, gent, Town Clerk. This is interesting as Thomas Paine’s grandfather, Thomas Cocke was Attorney and Deputy Recorder of Thetford. Thetford is twelve miles north of Bury St. Edmunds and it is easy to imagine how two families involved in local government met and intermarried.

It is also significant that Thomas Hustler might have been in conflict with the powers-to-be just before his death. He was removed from the office of Town Clerk along with Deputy Recorder in 1688. The time exactly coincides with political upheavals associated with the Glorious Revolution. It is tempting to think that some of this conflict of ideas filtered down to Thomas Paine. The Corporation Minute Books of Bury St. Edmunds 1652-1835 include: 

“June 26, 1688 – Gentlemen, Some time since I received a letter from you very full of duty and loyalty to our King, which you desired I would communicate to his Majesty from your Corporation. I was extremely glad of so good an opportunity of serving a body of men I always much esteemed and ever had an inclination to be kind to. Your King was pleased to read your letter himself, seemed much satisfied to find such an alteration in Bury, commanded me to thank you for it and to assure you from him that as he expects you will make good your word to him, so likewise his Majesty will most inviolably keep whatever he has promised in his Declaration. 

“After having obeyed his Majesty’s commands, give me leave in my own particular to return to my sincere acknowledgements for your kind expressions to me. If ever it be in my power to deserve it from you, assure yourselves I shall do it with all the readiness imaginable, and not more than you ought to expect from one that is so much, Gentlemen, your affectionate humble servant, 

“Dover”. 

19 July – The Deputy Recorder, John Sotheby, and the town clerk, Thomas Hustler, removed by order from the King and Council of 6 July, and Edmund Coleman and Jonathan Perry admitted by order of 7 July, without taking any oaths but those for the execution of their offices. 

10 August – Edmund Coleman sworn in as Recorder with all the oaths according to the statutes, and a common-councilman admitted in the same manner, taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and the oath mentioned in stat. 13 Car.11. Cap.1. 

23 August – Two aldermen sworn in as assistant justices, taking all the statutory oaths. 

18 September Order from the Privy Council for removing two aldermen (Thomas Burrough and Thomas Hustler, of whom the latter had been appointed on 16 March and four common-council-men (of whom two had been appointed on 14 May) and appointing certain others in their places without any oaths but that for the execution of their office. 

12 October – Two addresses to the King submitted for consideration, of which one was passed by a majority, to be presented by some of the members with all possible expedition. It is ordered to be entered in the book, but the page which follows is left blank. 

22 October – The King’s proclamation for restoring corporations is read, and entered at length; and the charter of surrender to Charles II, not being enrolled in any of the courts, and all persons appointed since by any patent or grant being dismissed by the proclamation, Martin Spencely, gent., is elected alderman under the old charter, and all the surviving members of the old Corporation are restored and the places vacant by death filled up. 

12 January – Sir Rob. Davers, bart., and Sir Tho. Hervey, knt., elected members of the convention-parliament. 

24 January – John Covell elected town clerk; he takes the oath for due execution of his office, and signs the statutory declaration, but the Recorder refuses to administer the oaths of allegiance and supremacy “in regard King James had left the realm, and it was conceived those oaths would be abrogated and new oaths appointed in their stead. 

1689 [-90], 6 March parliament. Sir Rob. Davers, bart., and Henry Goldwell, esq., elected for 

17 March – The town music discharged from future service in attending the Corporation, nemine contradicente. 

Thomas Hustler’s father, Samuel Hustler of Bury St Edmunds was also involved in the local political scene. He was appointed Undersheriff for Suffolk in 1675, Samuel had been appointed Alderman of Bury St Edmunds in 1665 at the time of the Great Plague. 

1665, The Great Plague broke out in London, and soon spread. Many villages around Bury were stricken. People leaving London who were already infected spread the disease to friends or relatives in the country. 

One of the worst hit local places for plague was Needham Market. Chains were set up at either end of Needham and the inhabitants isolated themselves from the outside world. Food was delivered to the barriers in exchange for money left there by the inhabitants. Local tradition states that the dead were buried in two local fields. Normally the dead of Needham would be buried and registered at Barking, but during the plague this could not happen. 

At Bury emergency measures were also taken in the town. Thomas Bull, owner of the Angel, and a common carrier, was forbidden to take his usual wagons runs to London. A watch was posted at each town gate to keep out travellers, and it seems that these measures actually worked. 

Despite the effective measures put in place in Bury against infection, in this plague year three Alderman were elected in Bury one after the other, as each in turn refused to accept office, because they would be tied to the town if plague should arrive. Fines of “35 and £50 were imposed for their refusal to accept, and only a fourth elected person, Samuel Hustler, accepted the office. 

In Bury, the Guildhall Feoffees built the Pest House as an isolation hospital in Sexton’s Meadows. It was not needed in 1665, as they succeeded in keeping the plague out of Bury. After this the plague seems to have died down, but by 1677 another deadly disease, smallpox, would terrify the town. 

The smallpox outbreak may account for Samuel’s death in 1677. He was buried at St. Mary’s on 23 December, 1677 – Mr Samuel Hustler, a principal burgess. In his will he refers to “my grandchildren, sons and daughters of my son Thomas: Samuel, Thomas and Elizabeth” and gifts them £50 apiece. His granddaughter, Frances, and grandson, Charles, were born 2-3 years after his death and as such were not included. 

My conclusion is that the Hustler grandmother referred to by Thomas Paine is Frances (or possibly Elizabeth) Hustler who was the daughter of Thomas Hustler and granddaughter of Samuel Hustler both of whom were very actively involved in local politics. It is easy to imagine this familial taste for political affairs having some influence on Thomas Paine.

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INTRODUCTION 

We are fortunate to live in an era when the name “Tom Paine” is well known to virtually every high school and college student in America, and to a great many more students throughout the English speaking world, and the empire of France, parlayed into a worldwide reading public. Paine was a confidant and advisor to George Washington, Napoleon, and Thomas Jefferson. As the author of well respected books and pamphlets, letters and moral essays, Paine offers generation after generation his fiery eloquence, hammering away at vital issues of the American War for Independence, and then for the issues surrounding France’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary governments. Paine’s biographers, from Thomas Clio Rickman, 1819,1 and Calvin Blanchard, 1885, to the latest biographical work, that is John Keane’s award winning A Political Life” of 1995,3 have captured the basic facts of Paine’s writing life, that is, that he was not wholly a geopolitical writer, not entirely a social philosopher, and not just a highly accomplished author of pamphlets, but that Paine should have been credited with innovations and ingenious applications of wrought iron and cantilevered bridging techniques that are worthy of respect, and professional accreditation by constructors, engineers and architects, from his day to ours. 

TABULATING PAINE’S ARCHITECT-ENGINEER ACHIEVEMENTS 

When surveying Paine’s many non-engineering writings, from among the titles that made him famous, such as Common Sense, The Crisis, his other pamphlets, Rights of Man – Parts 1 & 2, Age of Reason – Parts 1 & 2, and other writings, it is evident that his massive political and philosophical accomplishments have tended to submerge and thus overshadow his work in the world of technology. 

It is unfortunate in the 21st Century that Paine’s technical writing skills have gone unrecognized. Intellectual stimulus was certainly in the air. From 1750. until 1772, L’Encylopedie edited by Denis Diderot with conspicuous help from Voltaire, brought a watershed of technology, 

watershed of technology, intellectual property, manufacturing, crafts and trades into public view. 

We can imagine with what delight Paine would view L’Encyclopedie, rich with engineering knowledge as well as the rational new wealth of philosophy from Voltaire. Here, in these pages, where the focus and emphasis will be on Paine’s scientific technical work –that is his architectural and engineering skill we will sort out and identify how Paine’s technical life was over-laid on the political. If a mental picture of this division of his mental capacity would be helpful, we can imagine the plans of an iron ship, each space compartmentalized and shut off from the others for Paine’s intellectual life, there are whole years where his intense bridging building and metallurgy innovations at the iron works seem to determine the direction of his life. 

Yet in other sealed off compartments, we see more years where the turbulence and mayhem from the American Revolution simply seized the rudder of his life. And then – just when he was back on track with his bridge building and engineering, Paine was again pulled asunder and thrown headlong into that most dangerous compartment of his life, the French Revolution. 

The Paine biographers cited above are generally well aware of his trip to France and England starting in 1787, Paine’s up and down popularity amidst the Revolutionary French, his imprisonment, with his freedom gained through Ben Franklin’s intervention, and at last a safe passage bound for America in 1794. What is not well spelled out and documented are the interim years of Paine’s European Voyage 1787 – 1794, and his later years in the French legislature. By early 1787, Paine had prepared himself exceptionally well for his European Voyage by making three scale model miniature bridges of his iron bridge, over the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia, to both serve as demonstrations of what his actual bridges would look like. These models were also to file with English and French government agents whom we would today call Patent Officers, along with his applications to be granted copyrights and trade mark patents – where the models would be lawful requirements – to accompany the paperwork for official study and review. In England, the topic of bridges was hot – the stately Blackfriars Bridge had fallen into the Thames, along with two older and lesser bridges. Iron bridging technology was a welcome topic when Paine landed in England. 

The first model bridge Paine exhibited was made in wood, that is mahogany of the finest quality, workmanship and lustre. This is the model left with the French where it was displayed with great admiration and interest at the Louvre for technical assessment, and for public display. The mahogany model was the one chosen to show to the French Academy of Science, where many of the eminent scientific intellectuals of French society had offices. Quoting Calvin Blanchard, 

“This model received the unqualified approbation of the Academy, and it was afterwards adopted by the most scientific men of England.” 

Thanks to Paine, the history of iron bridges can thus be dated to begin in England in 1787. He reserved the other two bridge models for later use, the one in cast iron being next placed with the English authorities for patents and trademarks in London, also in 1787. This model was another mandatory submittal for the patent application process, thus leaving its creator with only one model left, which was made of wrought-iron, connected with blocks of wood shaped and painted to emulate cast-iron blocks. He carried this model about for some time as a talking piece when queried by learned constructors and engineers. The mahogany bridge model at the Louvre was proposed for an arch bridge, with a 400 foot span. In England, Paine contracted for and had built the bridge after his cast iron model, made from five cast-iron arch ribs, each of 110 feet in length, on a site outside London. In 1789, he designed, fabricated and load-tested another bridge trial rib. By 1790, a complete wrought iron and cast iron bridge of Paine’s design of some 36 tons was assembled and on display on Paddington Green, for a period exceeding a year, but with Paine by then stranded in Revolutionary France and committed to a post in the French government, the financing and business management arrangements of his engineering projects went askew, and the wrought iron and iron segments of Paine’s bridge were sold for the benefit of creditors. 

Nonetheless, Paine’s iron achievements at Paddington Green had become the prototype for other iron bridges, the best known of which is the well known Wear Bridge at Sunderland, England in 1796. Bridge architects and engineers are also beholden to Paine for cantilevered bridging techniques, which have been widespread since the 1800’s in England first, then all of Europe and the US. Today, there are several collections of wrought iron and iron bridges that have been named as historic structures after the Paine concepts, the most numerous in England, some in France and Spain, six have been itemized in the USA, and many in Russia by special selection by Czarina Catharina, the former German princess Katharina, called “The Great” for her technical choices and innovations and for her artistic patronages. Last, in the legacy and heritage of Paine’s bridge thinking, typifying cantilevered principles, there is the first iron bridge in America, constructed in 1839 – and still in service – the Dunlap Creek Bridge, Brownsville, Pennsylvania.7 

WE DIGRESS PAINE’S ROOTS IN AMERICA & HIS EDUCATION 

Paine’s bridge story does not simply go to England, then France, then return, a mere exodus back to America. Not unexpectedly, it would be back home in these new United States where Paine would reinvigorate and regain his engineering and planning momentum for iron bridges, but did culminate in his proposals to President Jefferson and the Continental Congress to install iron bridges, along with their accompanying canals and roads – a virtual road map for invigorating a new nation with a vigorous commercial transportation network. In his notes on his 1803 proposals to Congress, he mentions that he had requested without response the prompt return of his iron, and wrought iron models from England for illustrative demonstrations in America. It is generally believed that his mahogany bridge model still resides in the Louvre, in Paris. 

It remains for Paine scholars, probably focused at the Pennsylvania universities, to pursue the whole of Paine’s writing from The Library of Congress, Office of Patent & Trade Mark, Smithsonian Technical and Scientific Museum, Thomas Jefferson Presidential Papers and archives, Ben Franklin papers and archives, British Engineering Society, and the records of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania bridge contracts and construction work centres. Likewise, French scholars of technology may want to sift Paine’s bridge technology work out from his political activities, and using official records, account for marks of Paine’s technical skill sets on the French nation, and its bridges, canals and road networks. 

Other Paine-inspired projects were built in later years after his death in the United States. John Keane, Paine’s excellent biographer, credits Paine with bringing the engineering for cantilevered bridges to the new world. One such example was built at Bordentown, New Jersey in 1820, and served as a model for cantilevered techniques for a century. Paine has been praised for his foresight as “the father of all great structures that now serve human convenience everywhere.” 

A lot of ink has been splashed about with special regard to Paine’s parents, upbringing, family trade, schooling, and expertise in youth without focusing these diverse factors into a harmonic blend of what made up Paine’s intellectual character, his work ethos, and his broad and deep knowledge of the arts and sciences. Mr. Rickman holds that Paine’s attendance at a respectable Latin School was the only formal education he received in England. This may be so, but better Latin schools of the day also had roots and channels to the study of algebra and geometry beyond simple mathematics; and with Latin comes the language masters like Virgil, historians like Seneca, political genius such as Julius Caesar – whose wooden and rope bridge across the Rhine River sparkles among Caesar’s achievements from The Gallic Wars; and then, numerous translations of Vitruvius’s technical text book, De Architectura, were in circulation. Budding mathematicians and bridge builders and architects would have certainly taken Vitruvius to heart in their youth and studied his works throughout life. To think Paine a man of limited intellect, stamina or drive would be to grossly underestimate him. As Blanchard tells us, “During his suspension [of 1764] from [his job as an excise officer] that he repaired to London, where he became a teacher in an academy kept by Mr. Noble of Goodman’s Fields; and during his leisure hours, he applied himself to the study of astronomy and natural philosophy. He availed himself of the advantages which the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson afforded, and made the acquaintance of Dr. Bevis, an able astronomer of the Royal Society.” 

The University of Philadelphia recognized Paine’s technical knowledge with the award of a Master’s Degree in 1787, and he was also admitted to Membership in the Philosophical Society that year, 1787, shortly before he embarked with his bridge models to France and England. By this time, thanks to his editing and writing, he was very popular among the public and quoting Blanchard, “[Paine] enjoyed the esteem and friendship of the most literary, scientific and patriotic men of the age.” 

It is noteworthy that both British and French formal educational institutions made good and sufficient distinguished awards to him as to any learned professor, master, or doctor of arts & sciences in his era. That the British patent office granted him the British patents on his iron bridge by 1789 is a hallmark distinction before all of Britain’s industry and the law, recognising him the legitimate inventor and owner of the technologies described by Paine and modelled by him for the British patent office. 

It would seem that Paine was one of those technocrats whose education never stopped, and that he absorbed a great deal of geopolitical and diplomatic knowledge from his writing and editing of the revolutionary materials for the American war for independence, then embellished his mind and pragmatic skills the upper mathematics and construction sciences, to rank amongst the most skilled engineers of his era, be it London, Paris or Philadelphia. It is ironic that Paine’s skill and determination in engineering, architecture, science and technology, iron mongering, smelting the well hammered bolts and rivets, hot & sweaty, from the grimy anvil was precisely what brought Paine to England and France, not his pamphlets and politics. Here is truly an original genius worthy of the rank and title of professional engineer. 

PAINE’S LETTER TO GEORGE WASHINGTON OF MAY 1st, 1790 

This letter is from London, to Paine’s Commander, Benefactor & Friend, further FROM LONDON A TRANSMITTAL LETTER TO PAINE’S COMMANDER, BENEFACTOR & FRIEND, further, promises the Key to The Bastille to Washington; and important bridge news. An unusual and brief letter of only five paragraphs and a footnote tell us today so much about the relationship between Washington and Paine, what made them compatriots, kindred spirits, and Amici, in revolutionary French terms, that we pause here to read with Washington these words of Paine: 

“Sir: Our very good Friend, the Marquis de la Fayette has entrusted to my care the Key of the Bastille and a drawing handsomely framed, representing the demolition of that detestable prison as a present to your Excellency, of which his [Marquis de la Fayette] letter will particularly inform [you].” [This is the one and the same key had shut up from freedom, and sent to torture and death so many brave revolutionaries and persons of free thought in France for generations. This key, in and of itself is emblematic of the worst elements of kingship, aristocracy, faux aristocracy, and the engines of the police state which whip and flog, hang and guillotine, pull the teeth and nails of the plebiscite, and the fact that Paine has successfully argued for its disposition to be made not only in The New World, but in the American hands of General Washington this is no small miracle. The Louvre or other museums or national galleries in France, Britain would have been worthy repositories, then and now.] The letter continues: 

“I feel myself happy in being the person thro’ whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the Spoils of Despotism and the first ripe fruits of American principles transported into Europe to his great Master and Patron. He [the Marquis] mentioned to me the present he intended [to] you [that] my heart leaped with Joy – It is something so truly in character that no remarks can illustrate it and is more happily expressive of his remembrance of his American friends than any letter can convey. That the principles of America opened the Bastille is not to be doubted, and therefore the key comes to the right place [that is, to General George Washington.] We are advised that ” Mr. West wishes Mr. Trumbull [the noted British painter) to make a painting of the presentation of the Key to you.” 

Never bashful, having used the first four of the five paragraph epistle of this 1790 letter to describe the gift of the key to the Bastille to Gen. Washington, Paine proceeds in a personal tone, that is news promptly and bluntly delivered, as from one soldier or sailor to another. Paine’s news: 

“I have manufactured a Bridge (a Single arch) of one hundred & ten feet Span, and five feet high from the Cord of the Arch It is now aboard a vessel coming from Yorkshire to London where it is to be erected. It is this only which keeps me [in] Europe…” Fate and the French Revolution would of course change Paine’s plans, yet here in this letter of May the first, 1790, the reader is favoured with the news of the Key to the Bastille, and a tidy progress report on the iron bridge. There were only two persons in Europe or America who had these facts, and one of them was George Washington [Eric Foner p374-5]. 

HIGHLIGHTS OF PAINE’S LENGTHY STAY IN FRANCE: The French Decade, 1792 – 1802 

Paine’s departure from Europe had nothing to do with his scientific and technical pursuits, but on account of his politics, and the harshness of the era. To explain why Paine’s exodus was both hasty and necessary to safeguard his life, a brief sidelight to the French Revolution is needed. 

Parts of Paine’s career are similar to another great pamphleteer, the Englishman, John Milton. It is known by historians of the French Revolution that it was much more violent and bloodier than either The Glorious Revolution in England, leaving Oliver Cromwell’s forces in power; next, then to the new world, the American War of Independence, leaving George Washington’s and Lafayette’s forces in power. The regicide of the British sovereign, King Charles I, traumatized the English people so thoroughly that in the English Restoration, a new king and his royal line were promptly brought back to the throne. It is fortunate for Mr. John Milton, the greatest pamphleteer in English before Paine, that Milton made his anti-royalist statements on the inherent mismanagement and often villainy of the aristocracy, and their courts, in his famous pamphlet, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1648), which boldly supported whatever means were needed to divest a state of its hereditary monarchs, hangers-on, tainted judges and lax royal administrators. Had Milton’s pamphlet appeared a few weeks before the axe man cleaved a royal head from its king, Mr. Milton might have found himself swinging from a handy tree branch, or being disembowelled and roasted alive, at public execution, with other Roundheads who despised the king and brought about his death? Luckily, Milton’s scathing criticism of the English throne came weeks after the regicide, leaving Milton as a commentator, not a perpetrator, nor an instigator. Like Milton, Paine had clean hands where the path of the guillotine lay across France. 

However, our engineering and bridge building friend, Mr. Paine, found himself in a Miltonic milieu because in his pleas [and petitions] to spare the life of the king whom he insisted on identifying as Mr. Louis Capet. “And while conceding the odious waste, maladministration, misuse of office, etc., yet still in Paine’s view, the regent sovereign of France did not merit the death sentence. Here, due to his siding with humanitarian, less reactionary revolutionaries, Paine had made enemies in dangerous times and places. 

Robespierre in that very same year, thought eradicating France’s enemies the best solution, and held that the king of France and vast numbers of his retinue should perish, and so many aristocrats and faux aristocrats alike went then at Robespierre’s order, to the executioners, often tossed headlong into a public square in Paris, there to die by that most French execution device, the guillotine. 

Paine had earlier found himself jailed in Paris in 1793, but was then also was released, through the actions of powerful friends, led by Ben Franklin, and the American president. Now years later, 1799, even when firebrands such as Robespierre and Marat were dead, and different revolutionaries in power, Paine’s name was again put on the list of criminal undesirables. And he was again in great danger of the guillotine. Paine records in his own handwriting shows his wonderment of the events at the Luxembourg prison, Bruges, Belgium, for all of calendar 1799. It was at this prison which French authorities took 160 of 168 prisoners from their cells, and removed all but a few of these individuals to the guillotine in the space of only one night. Paine himself and seven others were spared, without explanation. 

In fact, when finally Paine boarded a ship from the port of Le Harve in 1802, he was just days ahead of a French warrant would have terminated his liberty, and perhaps his life. Also British ships were seen prowling the water around Calais, and said to have British warrants for Paine’s arrest, and transport and imprisonment to England for allegations of treason. 

What, indeed, had provoked the British authorities to pursue Paine across The English Channel? As early as December, 1797, in pamphlets and plans, he advocated a strategy and techniques for invading England. His proposal was sent in Memorandum form to Napoleon, with recommendations to build a French fleet of shallow-bottomed gunboats and flat bottom barges for transport of infantry and cavalry. He continued to advocate the invasion of England through 1798, using the auspices of M. Bonneville, his good friend, publishing in Paris in his friend’s “Bien Informe,” a press for pamphlets and newsletters. In 1798, he befriended the steamship innovator and naval architect Robert Fulton in Paris, while Paine himself was exploring the potentials for iron and steel and steam in ships – again mixing politics with technology. 

By 1798, Paine had also advocated to the French government with copies memos to Napoleon that French forces should go the assistance of Irish uprisings, and advocated overthrow of English rule across the whole of Ireland. In 1799, through “Bien Informe” he advocated open seas and international commerce regulation for all nations. By 1800, his paper Parte Maritime had proposed international regulation and standard rules for excise, safety and administration amongst the nations. He had also filled out his proposal to Napoleon to link the regions of France through its rivers, and estuaries, with new connecting canals and iron bridges. Couple these with Paine’s offense/defense/invasion planning skills, and we have Paine, the military engineer. For his regional linking proposal to Napoleon, he produced as many as four of the iron bridges he envisioned, using models five feet in length. Apparently, even this work was not appreciated, since he was voted out of his elected office in French government by his enemies, and slander undercutting his loyalties were tallied up against him. 

Had this architect-engineer not have exited France in such a speedy manner, the Tom Paine story might have ended in one of the mass graves dug outside of Paris for the decapitated bodies of enemies of the state. 

BRIDGES FOR AMERICA-PAINE’s 1803 PROPOSAL TO CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT JEFFERSON 

Returning to the American shores in 1803, it was some time before Paine devoted himself to technical matters again, but this time distinctive American in nature. 

His massive 1803 proposal plan for America’s bridges, waterways, canals and their collective commercial and military consequences is his great gift to the new nation, presented in proposal form to the Congress and President Jefferson. Recalling that his study of French waterways and bridging, that concept would be a prototype for the American proposal. Paine embarked on scrutinizing innovations and improvements for US bridges and canals, based on existing data and maps. It must be remembered that cartography was often a rough hewn science, and that much of America was poorly mapped, even after Lewis & Clark made their extensive exploration of the new American territories added by The Louisiana Purchase. He did extensive model building in 1803 to support his proposals. 

His techniques for the American proposal seem straightforward in his “The Construction of Iron Bridges, June 13, 1803,” which is quintessential Paine for documenting his American skills and achievements. While writing a nationwide schema for a great nation such as France may seem enough to exhaust many technical folk, Paine began a massive analysis of how best to safeguard, provide patrol boats/revenue cutters, bridges, canals and supporting civil constructions for the most newly acquired waters of America to follow The Louisiana Purchase. From 1803-1807, he did extensive model making and design work. In 1807, he wrote a series of articles articulating how to construct and manage a fleet of gunboats to defend American shores. The model gunboats made for this engineering mock-up were sent to the President in September, 1807. As with his bridge proposal, Mr. Paine used his modelling skills to carve models of armed river craft which the United States would patrol the gigantic new river basins along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, their streams and estuaries, from the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, to the northernmost rivers coming into America from Canada. He proposed the boats to be light, fast, able to hold troops, effective and economic. His model making skills for boats were well received at the US Patent & Trade Office; and delivered on President Jefferson’s desk were new boat models for the proposal. We are reminded here of Paine’s equally energetic plans for shallow draft gunboats for his proposals to Napoleon for an invasion of England. 

Naturally, where so many well charted rivers that needed bridging, iron bridge technology would bring many advantages, such as prefabrication, transportation by section, ease of assembly by semi-skilled workers, and ease of manufacture at large ironmongers. As with his study of France and concepts for streamlining that nation’s waterways and estuaries with bridges, stream widening, river deepening, and canal building, there was in Paine’s vision, a genuinely speedy and cost effective means for the new republic to safeguard its waterways. He proposed his model patrol ship to be a small, fast and trim military vessel to collect taxes, and assure safety of the waters, monitor smuggling, and control pirates and privateers — a real problem in the Barataria swamp and bayou regions outside New Orleans. 

Paine’s years in the British Excise office immediately jump to mind, that he was a skilful and knowledgeable taxation & duty officer for some years. Paine’s proposals to America, when fulfilled, would have assured that the many cities, towns, villages and settlements would get bountiful commercial river traffic and timely communication of information. 

It seems likely that Paine’s credentials to design and model a prototype small warship for patrols of US waters came from his youth, when having gained a sense of quality materials and good workmanship in the family stay business, he embarked literally into the world of privateering. Aboard the British licensed privateer, named “Terrible,” where the ship’s commander listed himself as “Captain Death,” we can imagine Paine as a young apprentice, perhaps working under the tutelage of the ship’s sail maker, or the carpenter, for the maintenance of the ship. After a brief stay, Paine shipped on board “The King of Prussia,” another privateer of British licensure, where he was most likely in the Able Bodied Seaman (ABS) category, fit for many jobs of seamanship. At the pleadings of his father, Paine left the nautical life on privateers after another brief stay on “King of Prussia.” We must remember that his nautical days were all done by 1759. Serving aboard vessels devoted to privateering seems to have provided Paine with basic ship design ideas for his own models, that is, for fast revenue cutters and nimble patrol corvettes, as he wrote about them some four decades later in his proposals to the Americans. 

The 1803 negotiations with the French for the turn-over of “Louisiana” whatever shape and size that would be, was still a mystery in 1802 – it was a complete surprise to American negotiators when French diplomats made the decision not to withhold or exempt any parishes or locations from one massive sweeping sale. Even today, the size of the lands absorbed into America by the Louisiana Purchase are huge, sweeping from the mouth of the Mississippi up to and across the border with Canada. 

Paine’s engineering skills helped him assimilate proposals for the massive transportation problems that the Louisiana Purchase brought with it. It was fortunate America had one such engineer on hand. Paine wrote a very persuasive letter to Jefferson, urging him to buy the entirety of the Louisiana Territory from France, with the consent of the occupants. Initially, Jefferson was considering buying only New Orleans, and the Florida’s, and in other important correspondence, Paine itemized to Jefferson the constitutional ramifications of assimilating so great a purchase; his correspondence to the president was also fiercely opposed to the Federalist proposal to seize New Orleans by force, which today seems fool-hearty and an invitation to war where there had been only peace. 

Having served in the French legislature as the representative of the great commercial, mercantile city of [le Port de] Calais in France, Paine had a keen eye for the pulse, ebb and flow of waterborne commerce. With an excellent knowledge of how the French government worked, its pitfalls and unusual characteristics. Moreover, he understood that Napoleon’s mandate that The French Law as specified by The Napoleonic Code would be permanent in the new US territories derived from France – which meant not converting the legal system over to the English Common Law, the familiar legal model of the Colonies. This meant that Louisiana would forever observe the Napoleonic Code. There is little doubt that Paine felt imminently well qualified to offer Jefferson and the young republic such advice due to his many years in France, working intimately with the French political administration and legislature councils of that nation which Blanchard calls then “the foremost nation in the world,” as he termed the new and imperial France. In his latter days, Paine was a good friend to France at the tables of American public opinion. 

By the time Paine grew ill and died in 1809, the many decades of theological and political warfare had battered down Paine’s good name. Many in England thought him a rogue, and then there was his hot-tempered, abrasive public letter to George Washington which won him no friends, and other opinion- based epistles – these had cast a shadow over his reputation as an editor, writer, technical man and statesman. His technical skills and achievements in engineering and architecture were lost to all but a few study New Englanders whose stock and trade was in the construction and bridge industry, and some scholars of his written work at large. 

Paine did himself no favours with his barbed epithets on religion, so that various religious revitalization movements brand him still as a heathen, atheist, or mean spirited agnostic – instead of one of the truest Age of Reason practitioners of Deism. When Thomas Edison publicly championed Paine’s reputation in the 1920s, and praised Paine’s whole canon of work, it is likely that engineers and architects at least in America, England and France, heaved a sigh of relief that Paine’s name was again a good one. Thomas Paine, American architect-engineer, innovator, inventor, political scientist, and man of letters had at long last gotten a laurel wreath he so long deserved. 

A BOLD NEW TECHNICAL IMAGE FOR PAINE 

Today a fresh image of Paine, Architect-Engineer, emerges from the technical side of the pantheon of American figures from the 18th Century. Paine deserves a more solemn 

solemn and prominent place for his technical accomplishments than he now holds for his political and ethical works by themselves. 

In Age of Reason neoclassic poses, we see grand and noble figures such as Washington, Voltaire and Franklin, carved by no less than the era’s master sculptor, Houdon. Indeed, we need to identify America’s 21st Century equal of Houdon, to be engaged for a brand new statuary of Paine. 

Today, with fresh emphasis on Paine the engineer, planner, model maker of bridges and ships, iron smith and draughtsman, we owe Mr. Paine a fresh new statuary to celebrate his broad, wide achievements in the crafts and sciences. And perhaps one new statue alone would not do a triumvirate might be needed. 

I suggest that three statues, that is, A Paine Triumvirate, should be created to show Century Paine in all his roles – writer, statesman, and architect-engineer. The first statue would be best set in the District of Columbia amidst the Federal Monuments, where Paine’s plain attire and a simple desk would show a pamphleteer and writer/editor at his work. 

A second sculpture then, in Philadelphia, close to Franklin’s home and the Liberty Bell, would be illustrative. Here, Paine’s wardrobe of a London gentleman’s clothing would best show him at our Constitutional Convention, then on to his elected office, representing Calais in the French legislature. Lastly, proposed as the engineer/architect Paine-a 3rd and final sculpture, which would be best placed in Cambridge/Boston, sited somewhere near the MIT Campus. This statue would remind the bustling crowds of the world of commerce about ordinary things like bridges and common sense. The almost divine smile of reason, I believe, would of necessity grace Paine’s face, where in artisan’s clothes, sitting on the work bench of an engineer or iron worker, Paine would hold a book on his knee with his left hand, and in the right hand and forearm, he would proudly cradle a model of his iron bridge. 

END NOTES 

[1] Thomas Clio Rickman, Life of Thomas Paine, especially, Preface and Chapter 1. However, in Part 2 of Rickman, this biographer confirms Paine’s bridge and model ship making skills; that his bridges were inspired by spider webs; and that his first model for the Paris trip was made from mahogany. 

[2] Complete Works of Thomas Paine, All Political and Theological Writings, preceded by A 

13 

Life of Paine, by Calvin Blanchard: Chicago, B.F. Ford, Clark & Co., 1885, pages 13-25, 26- 63. 

[3] John Keane, A Political Life: Biography of Thomas Paine, esp. Forward and Chapter 1. [4]David J. Brown, Bridges: Three Thousand Years of Defying Gravity, London: Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 1999, pages 48-50. 

[5] Lithograph, printed by British Institute of Engineering, 1796 – Iron Bridge over the Wear River, Sunderland County at Durham, England. 

[6] Paine, Collected Writings: Literary Classics, NY 1955, Distributed by Putnam Penguin, Notes and Editorial by Eric Foner. Of special notes pages 423-428, iron bridges; pages 842 – 853, other bridge information. 

[7] Calvin Blanchard, Complete Works of Thomas Paine, pages 64-87. 

SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION 

Thomas Edison, The Philosophy of Thomas Paine. Web address 

https://www.positive.atheism.org/hist/paine dsn/htm 

L’Encyclopedie,’ Denis Diderot, Editor, Paris: The Complete Illustrations, 1762-1777, in facsimile edition by Harry N. Abrama, Inc., NY, 1978. Facsimile prepared by and edited by Arnoldo Mondadoir, Editore, Milano, Italia. 

Biographical note on the author: 

Tim Whalen holds the BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Tulsa and is ABD in the Ph.D programme; he has published books on technical and proposal writing ay Pilot Books, ARTECH, Horizon Books, IEEE Press and Management Concepts. He has contributed articles to several journals. 

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La Pensee Politique de Thomas Paine en Contexte: Theorie at Pratique. Carine Lounissi. 894pp. Paris Honore Champion 2012. ISBN: 978 —2-7453-2359-0. £139.06. 

This fundamental contribution to Paine’s political thought, based on a Ph. D thesis at the Sorbonne, deserves to be translated into English so that it becomes available to all Anglophones interested in the subject. Dr Lounissi places his writings in context by examining the literature on which he apparently drew for inspiration, and also by discussing the often hostile reactions that they provoked. 

One can only say that previous political thinkers appear to have influenced Paine because he notoriously cited very few authorities in his publications and insisted that his ideas were original. Thus when critics dismissed Common Sense as being derived from John Locke he denied that he had ever read Two Treatises of Government. There were contemporaries who took him at his word that his political thought was homespun. Edmund Burke declined directly responding to the Rights of Man claiming that Paine had ‘not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of study or thinking—for the use of it’. 

Notwithstanding this, commentators on Paine’s political philosophy have sought to trace it back to previous philosophers. Thus despite his own disclaimer some have insisted that he was influenced by Locke since, even if he did not read his works, Lockean ideas were ‘in the air’, or he absorbed them ‘by osmosis’. Lounissi concludes that, while at first sight Paine’s thought often seems Lockean, on a deeper comparison between them differences emerge. For example both place the origins of government in a contract in which individuals agreed to set one up. Superficially these are similar if not identical models. But on closer examination they have significant differences. Locke accepted any government which was established by the contract — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or, as he claimed was the case in England, a mixture of these. Paine by contrast denied that the original contract could set up any hereditary form of government since it could not bind future generations. Only a polity in which the people had a voice was legitimate. 

Despite her scepticism Lounissi concludes that Paine’s contractual theory was sown in a Lockean soil. She also finds echoes in Paine of the contractual theories of Algernon Sidney and Rousseau. On the latter she is on firmer ground as Rousseau was one of the writers whom Paine did cite, along with Montesquieu, Voltaire and other philosophes, in Rights of Man. One of Paine’s hostile critics lamented that France had been a ‘generous and gallant nation’ before it was ‘unhappily sophisticated by the late — forged philosophy of ingenious, immoral vagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine’ As with all direct quotations from English authors Lounissi commendably translates this into French in the text but quotes the original in her footnote on page 185. 

The footnote cites the original in the edition of Political Writings of the 1790s edited by Gregory Claeys, in eight volumes published by Pickering and Chatto in 1995. These publishers have rendered a great service to students of Paine with this publication and also that of Thomas Paine and America 1776 — 1809, published in six volumes in 2009 of which Kenneth Burchell is editor. In her discussion of the reception of Paine’s works Lounissi draws frequently on these collections of contemporary works. 

It might be expected that a French scholar would be more informed about Paine’s career in France than about his activities in America. Dr Lounissi, however, is a specialist in the civilisation of the United States at the University of Rouen, with a particular interest in the history of the early Republic. Her book demonstrates familiarity with politics and political theory on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. Thus she points out that the constitutional arrangements for the United States outlined in Common Sense owed much to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for a union of the colonies spelled out at the Albany Congress of 1754. 

Although his proposals were sketchy, leading some to argue that Paine was more concerned with the negative task of bringing down governments rather than the positive problem of replacing them, Lounissi shows that in America he did contribute to the constitutional debates of the revolutionary era. He was not directly involved in the drafting of the radical constitution for Pennsylvania in 1776. This did not prevent his critics, led by John Adams, from associating him with its provisions for a unicameral legislature elected annually by universal adult male suffrage. He certainly supported it, at least initially, in several publications. Again he had no part in the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1787 which resulted in the American Constitution, being overseas in England at the time. But he did approve it to the point of recommending its adoption by the British. 

Paine did have a direct input into the drafting of the abortive French constitution of 1793, being appointed to the committee chaired by Condorcet charged with drawing it up. Unfortunately, as Lounissi points out, it is impossible to discern precisely what his role in the process was, though she does deduce that parts of the document were influenced by passages in Rights of Man, while the prefatory declaration of rights owed much to Paine too. He also had a say in the debates which resulted in the setting up of the Directory in 1795. Although his contribution to them, mainly objecting to the restriction of the franchise, has been long known, Lounissi’s familiarity with the French sources adds details not available elsewhere. 

She also demonstrates a formidable knowledge of English sources. For example, she places discussion of the welfare proposals in the second part of Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice in the context of the debate on the poor laws in the late eighteenth century. Her research unearthed an anecdote about Paine unknown to his biographers. Thomas Ruggles, in The History of the Poor published in 1793, recounted how he had recently sat next to Paine at a dinner, who informed him that, when his grandfather was an overseer of the poor at Thetford fifty years before, the poor rate was under £40. Now it was between £300 and £400. “In a short time if this evil is not stopped the friends of liberty will, with the greatest ease, walk over the ruins of the boasted constitution; its fall wants no acceleration from the friends of Gallic freedom.’ To this a gentleman instantly replied ‘Thomas, thy wish is father to the thought’.” 

After discussing Paine’s ideas on poverty and property Lounissi proceeds to investigate his republicanism. She concludes that he was not a republican in the eighteenth — century tradition of the commonwealthmen. These, also known as classical republicans, argued that governments always sought to reduce the liberty of their subjects and that it was the duty of the virtuous citizen to be constantly vigilant to detect attempts to do so and resist them. One method rulers employed to distract citizens from their machinations was to corrupt them, for instance by encouraging trade in luxury goods, which allegedly reduced their will to defend their rights. Classical republicans were therefore opposed to commercial expansion. Paine by contrast welcomed commerce and industry, not only because they stimulated economic growth but also because he believed free trade helped to disseminate ideas of liberty in other areas of human activity. 

Lounissi also investigates Paine’s credentials as a historian. He announced his intention of writing a three – volume history of the American Revolution and then of giving an historical account of the French Revolution. Neither of these ambitious projects was ever realised. As she observes, Paine had a certain talent for missing rendezvous with historiography. His only major contribution to the history of the American Revolution was an open Letter to Abbe Rayne! objecting to his interpretation of it. Raynal put the quarrel between Britain and the colonies down to a dispute about the right to raise taxes. Paine insisted that the British government all along plotted to provoke the Americans into violent resistance to its measures in order to deprive them of their liberties. 

Paine absorbed what he had so far written on the Revolution in France into the first part of Rights of Man. Just as his account of the American conflict was written to correct Raynal, as Lounissi observes, so that of the French was to put Burke right. She checks Paine’s account of the events he describes and demonstrates that he frequently got them wrong. In summing up his accounts of the two revolutions she concludes that he was more a theorist than a historian of them. 

Paine’s second sojourn in America, following his return from France, is a period of his life that has been frequently skipped over quickly. Yet during his last few years Paine continued to publish quite prolifically. Lounissi and another French scholar, Marc Belissa, are now doing justice to his later works. For as Lounissi points out, even if these publications did not necessarily add new aspects to his thought, they are nevertheless important. Thus his political writings against the Federalists led by John Adams contributed to the debate over whether the ideals of the American Revolution were in danger until they were rescued by Thomas Jefferson. 

After dealing with Paine’s last years Lounissi ends the book with another account of his political activities in France. Thus she goes into detail on his role in the trial of Louis XVI, and publishes three appendices of contributions he made in the debates on the king’s fate. Two of them have not previously appeared in any collection of his writings, while only inaccurate versions of the third were ever published. 

This exhaustive investigation of Paine’s political thought, which covers all his speculative writings except those on religion, is a colossal achievement. Its range is indicated by the bibliography, which takes up sixty five pages. It is a pity that the index is confined to the names of people mentioned in the text, and even then omits some. But a comprehensive index would have made an already lengthy book unwieldy and more expensive. 

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In the first part of The Age of Reason, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction to his ideas on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this account in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider the sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the earth. 

He then describes the solar system – the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for earth of 231/2°. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the sun. These figures are incorrect now but the figures Paine gives for the earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772 Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Bessel calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the ‘fixed’ stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, so does the sun in the centre of the system’. William Herschel! communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars and suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions of those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed make in their circuit round the sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator – otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, – it is from the sciences that all the mechanical are that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. Paine even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality. 

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it? Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Badly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry) were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and the astronomer Joseph Jerome Lefrangois de Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin Martin (1704-1782). A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument- maker, and general compiler of information! He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over thirty major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention!), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James Ferguson (1710-1776). A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschel! for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London, sometime also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John Bevis (1693-1771). He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of the Rev. Nathaniel Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple [London]. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was quickly from his telescope one day he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period in his life, at the Temple, as a FRS, that Paine knew him. `As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that [Thomas ‘Clio’] Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been twenty years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Fergusson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on his second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschel discovered the seventh, telescopic , planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. There must have been occasions of much general public comment – especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the sun from earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschel made his great forty foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly was later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals and shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he has gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.

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The country may have celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in spectacular style this year, but is everything really happy and glorious with the monarchy in 21st Century Britain — or is it time for Britain to become a republic? 

A committee member of the Thomas Paine Society UK was asked to join in this live debate in front of a 160 strong at the Brighton Dome Studio Theatre in November 2012. Paul Myles agreed to join in the Question Time style event. There were four panellists, all of whom gave a 5 minute opening and closing statement. The audience joined in either by asking questions or taking part in the snap opinion polls via the electronic voting system. 

The opening theme was : What can we learn from monarchies that have become republics in the past? Does the issue even matter in the modern world? 

The panel of 4 experts included: 

Graham Smith, who heads the campaigning organization Republic , and has been outspoken on issues including Prince Charles’s lobbying of Government departments, and which is calling for an honours system decided by the people; 

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo , historian and royal commentator. One of North America’s leading royal commentators, he is an expert in monarchy, protocol, honours and British traditions, Rafe is the former editor of Burke’s World Orders of Knighthood & Merit. He is a trustee of the Canadian Royal Heritage Trust and a Research Associate at the leading public policy think tank ResPublica; 

Richard Whatmore, Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at the University of Sussex, whose interests include the history of democracy, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. 

Paul Myles of the Thomas Paine Society UK, which promotes the revolutionary thinker’s contribution to democracy and freedom; 

Graham Smith opened with a clear republican argument, that the monarchy is an outdated and quirky establishment, which does not add to the nation, not even in tourism terms. 

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo was clearly pro monarchy, and took the familiar pro monarchical argumentative line, stability, 1000 years of history, glorious in the reigns. His later arguments were nuanced, acknowledging the need for some change. 

Richard Whatmore brought gravitas and accuracy to the debate, and argued that the European Union is much more important over the long term than anything the UK may struggle with locally. 

Paul Myles took the position for disestablishment of the Church of England. Paul suggested that this was an achievable aim, and would re-balance our society into a modem state over time. He pointed out that on the world map of secularity the UK was showing as yellow meaning “ambiguous” on this matter. Rafe agreed with Paul that England and Iran were the only two nation states with unelected clergy in their legislative chambers. 

The first vote was 75% in favour of England becoming a republic, this showed the republican leanings of the mostly local audience. In conversation with Graham Smith and Rafe Heydel-Mankoo this was markedly different to many previous debates in the UK where these two regularly lock horns. 

The debate was very lively with a lot of audience participation, the panellist’s cut and thrust was matched by audience intervention and the passion really showed at times, both sides of the debate. Chillingly there was a moment where a young student member of the audience claimed the absolutist monarch from his home country in Africa was good and benevolent for all and he did not understand why we were debating authority. After a comment by Rafe that the polls had never shown such a high rating for the Royal Family in comparison to the leading politicians Myles riposted that that was like comparing the BBC “Eastenders” with “Question time”, that one was emotional and frivolous and the other a serious attempt to deal with the issues of the day. 

One of Rafe’s arguments was the continuity of glorious monarchs in England over a thousand years, this point was efficiently dismissed by Myles and Whatmore pointing out the enforced interruption by Cromwell and by bringing up Thomas Paine’s comment about William the Conqueror being ” a bastard son of a whore”, as the start of that thousand year history. . Whatmore also pointed out the Royal System had placed a crown on more than one ” idiot”. 

The evening went with a real swing, and notwithstanding the heat ended amicably, with the final vote showing no change in the audience position. The feedback from this event, one of a series of topics, was very favourable, perhaps showing that there is an appetite for a debate of this kind. 

The Sussex Salon is a roundtable event where academics, practitioners and commentators share their views on hot topics. The Sussex Salon Series is organised by Dr Ruth Woodfield, a University of Sussex sociologist and Director of Widening Participation for the School of Law, Politics and Sociology.

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Religion For Atheists. Alain de Botton, London Hamish Hamilton. Hardback ISBN 978-0-241-14477-0 £18.99 

Alain de Botton describes his book as a non-believers’ guide to the uses of religion. Looking at religious practices, he thinks we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our modern secular society. He looks only at the bathwater, he believes sacramental processes are needed to form the gel of a caring community. At a low level, he fails to notice the squabbles these generate; what happens when flowers are arranged in a church to the dislike of certain parties, and similar issues? 

How can the ‘nice’ bits of religion be separated from their ideologies which have generated fear, hatred and persecution ? Practically all enlightened progress since the Renaissance has been made in the face of opposition by representatives of religion. Paine, and his publishers were no exception. 

Atheism until recently was only admitted with caution. This book comes close on the heels of other publications taking a ‘soft’ approach to atheism; Londoners may note this is akin to waiting for a bus, then several turn up at once! 

In 2008, the English translation of French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville’s, The book of Atheist Spirituality¹ appeared. This attempted to re-discover a spiritual heritage lost through being too closely intertwined with religion. Comte-Sponville writes, “it is possible to do without religion but not without communion, fidelity or love”. De Botton finds these latter essential qualities found in religion! A third book, Ariane Sherine’s compilation, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)² was a lighter look at how non-believers can celebrate the winter solstice; it contained contributions from, among the usual suspects, Dawkins and Grayling. Taking a more robust view, Robert Stovold’s, Did Christians steal Christmas? (2007)³ is an historical stance on pagan and more modern origins of the December festival. 

De Botton is a non-believer of Jewish parentage, a multimillionaire, founder of The School of Life’ and proponent of a vast atheist temple. He is often heard on the radio and television. But there is a great deal missing in this book. 

Religion for Atheists is a curious book. The author has nostalgia 

for something he never experienced. But he finds remnants in Jewish, Christian and Buddhist religions which appeal to his sense of community which these faiths provide. I have heard this called ‘belonging’ rather than ‘believing’. At the outset he dismisses debates about the truth of any religion as “the most boring and unproductive question one can ask”. I have been involved in discussions about the existence of god and I’m inclined to agree. There are no answers to convince those of the differing camps. De Botton sees only the good he wants to see in religion. Nineteenth century secularists, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins might never have existed. In this book we are stuck with the old conventions of BC and AD, not the updated form of BCE and CE. 

The longest chapter deals with education. The author derides too much concentration on grades and exam performance. This may be good; education, education, education was the mantra of New Labour in 1997. What we got was war, war, war. De Botton finds the concentration of book learning in such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century at the root of our move from true education. As he has a double-starred first in history at Cambridge, he should know! 

In this book of some 300 pages, there is lots of white space, and also paintings and photographs; some Old Master paintings, albeit only in black & white, enhance the text while other pictures leave the reader wondering as to their significance. The word Islam, and the religion associated with it, get no mention. He loves so much about the rites and rituals; but male circumcision in Judaism and Islam is not included. As this practice is considered barbaric by some, and certainly rarely consensual, it provides further examples of de Botton’s blinkered approach. He admires the spirit of neighbourliness, the joining of congregations for singing, communion and feasting. He extols the way religion brings abasement of monarchs at feet washing ceremonies for the poor and its lack of concern with worldly success or wealth. He should tell that to the Vatican City and those who shunned the ‘occupy’ camp at St Paul’s recently. The tents may have deterred some paying visitors to the Cathedral, but otherwise it was the nearby Starbuck’s customers who were most discomfited! 

So what are we left with? The word secular is used in the sense of non-religious, not the purist definition of separation of church and state touted by the National Secular Society. Humanism, as a positive code of morality without religion or superstitious back-up fails to gain entry. Yet new ways of celebrating a life at time of death, as well as baby naming and weddings are the most common source of knowledge about humanism and the British Humanist Association. These ceremonies without god are on the increase year on year. 

De Botton applauds all the wonderful human gatherings and festivities generated by religious organizations; he also praises the works of humans in music, poetry, art and architecture. True many patrons have been found through religion for the creation of these artefacts. But there are many secular equivalents, and just a few which have been borne out of non-religious ethical groups. In London, Conway Hall is home of the South Place Ethical Society; its roots may have been religious, but it has long dropped the connection to become a centre of humanist thought and action. Above the proscenium in the main hall are proclaimed Shakespeare’s words: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’. In Leicester is the even older Secular Hall, with statues of Socrates, Owen, Paine, Voltaire and, perhaps surprisingly, Jesus. 

In the nineteenth century Auguste Comte put forward ideas for a Religion of Humanity, with institutions and buildings for ‘secular churches’. This did not succeed; de Botton sees in Comte recognition that humans have a need for religion. Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, used this as part of his theory about the part religion plays in human ‘camaraderie and solidarity’. De Botton recognises our sense of anomie, but barely accepts attempts to overcome this in the past. 

Visiting cathedrals, ministers and churches are notable aspects of modern pilgrimages, which we call tourism. I think walking into a centuries old country church gives one a feeling for history and the past in a very human way; it has nothing to do with religious observance, it is just somewhere to find a place that has been trodden by forbears and find out about their lives. Before a certain date, all records of birth, marriage and death were in the parish registers. 

In common with some of his generation, de Botton finds Buddhism offers ‘something’ missing from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even Sam Harris, in his 2004 The End of Faith⁴ veers in this direction; though Harris spoilt it by suggesting Islamic terrorists should be nuked before they get us! 

Apart from the humanist rites of passage mentioned, there is a clear need for this ‘something’ in our lives as non-believers. In the 1960s, with more optimism than we appear to have now, Richard Robinson wrote in An Atheists’s Values⁵: “We need to create and spread symbols and procedures that will confirm our intentions without involving us in intellectual dishonesty. The need is urgent today. For we have as yet no strong ceremonies to confirm our resolve except religious ceremonies., and most of us cannot join in religious ceremonies with a good conscience. When the Titanic went down, people sang ‘Nearer my God, to thee’. When the Gloucester’s were in prison in North Korea they strengthened themselves with religious ceremonies. At present we know no other way to strengthen ourselves in our most testing and tragic times. Yet this way has become dishonest. That is why it is urgent for us to create new ceremonies, through which to find strength in these terrible situations. It is not enough to formulate honest and high ideals. We must also create the ceremonies and the atmosphere that will hold them before us at all times. I have no conception how to do this; but I believe it will be done if we try”. That is the challenge. 

References

1. THE ATHEIST BOOK OF SPIRITUALITY. Andre Comte-Sponville. Bantam 2008 ISBN 978-0-553-81990-8 
2. THE ATHEIST’S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS. edited by Mane Sherine. Friday Books 2009 ISBN 978-0-00-732281-9 
3. DID CHRISTIANS STEAL CHRISTMAS. R J Stovold. National Secular Society 2007 ISBN 978-0-903753-05-3 
4. THE END OF FAITH. Sam Harris. W W Norton 2004 ISBN 0-743-26809- 1. 
5. AN ATHEISTS VALUES. Richard Robinson, Oxford 1964 ISBN 978-0- 631-159704. 

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In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer, 232 pages hardback, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-18044-2. 

This is a book about a book, and not just any book! The Sepher Torah (Old Testament) remains a Holy Book for three religions. True the Jews set more store by the Biblical commentaries of the Talmud, the Christians by the New Testament, and the Muslims by the Koran, but the Old Testament remains an important weapon in the armoury of religious ideology and the machinations of priesthood. 

Michael Walzer is not a theologian, he admits he has only a schoolboy’s knowledge of ancient Hebrew and a layman’s understanding of the history and archaeology of the ancient world. He is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and his aim is to examine the ideas about politics, the understandings of government and law that are expressed in the Hebrew bible. 

Israel, he tells us, was founded twice once as a kin group and once as a nation. Both times there were alleged covenants with the god YHWH. Yet the stories of these events were written long after the events not as history but as religious propaganda. The story of the covenant of Abraham with YHWH is an obvious explanation for the replacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice much of which was appropriated by the Levite priesthood. 

Walzer accepts that many Jews were in exile in Egypt although not actually employed as slave labourers building the treasure houses of the ruling class. He accepts they were led out by Moses and Aaron and after wandering in the desert set about conquering and stealing the land of their more advanced Canaanite neighbours in the process forging another covenant with YHWH. They were led by a mysterious religious artefact, the Ark of the Covenant supposedly containing the commandments given to Moses, which equally mysteriously vanished just as later the Christian Holy Grail would vanish. 

Archaeology suggests they were marginalised Canaanites who coalesced into twelve tribes and whose priesthood adopted the faith of YHWH. Moses allegedly the faith of what was a Kenite mountain and thunder god when he wed into the tribe in the Land of Midian, Yet the use of the plural Elohim in the first lines of Genesis suggests the Jews were originally polytheists. 

This is understandable considering the local goddess cults were more fun and far more sexy than the rather austere worship of YHWH. In Kabbalah there is a female figure, the Shekinah, who sits on the right hand of God. And in song the Sabbath is depicted as a bride eagerly awaiting the coming of her husband. 

For three hundred years the Jews were ruled by those mysterious figures the Judges, the Bible names twelve of them. Walzer writes that the whole of the Jewish intelligentsia, such as it was, was engaged in arguing about the law. In practice they were deciding what the content of the Sinai covenant should be and also legitimising their own role. Ultimately the Law, like everything else, was God’s. But with anything that in origin is really human there are contradictions and the Talmud refers to the contradictory works of Hillel and Shami as both being “the words of the living God.” 

After the prophet Samuel the failing of the rule of the Judges became obvious and the Jews adopted a monarchy which eventually split into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judea. These two kingdoms not only fought threatening foreign powers but often fought each other. The Jewish nation had been founded on the genocide of seven Canaanite nations, monotheism being a convenient ideological excuse for this. Polytheism was far more tolerant and multicentric. Now the Jews often found themselves conquered by more powerful, more technically advanced nations, many of them vanishing into the dominant population. Ten of the twelve tribes vanished as did the dynasty of the David kings. Jesus may well have laid claim to this, if he existed at all. 

As Walzer points out the Old Testament starts out as the history of a very dysfunctional family. The struggle continued except that now it is a struggle for a royal inheritance. The common people fade into the distance. 

The Bible has much to say about kingcraft and priestcraft but nothing about democracy or a republic, common terms in ancient Greek politics Not surprisingly Messianism, the hope for future redemption in which a messiah plays a leading role, became popular among the subjugated masses. Jesus either deliberately adopted or was painted into this role. In comparison to the Jewish savages, the Greeks were miles ahead! In political and philosophical terms we owe far more to them than to the Jews of antiquity. 

One may think all this is very ancient history but the past, even the past of a savage tribe of genocide! killers, affects the present. The British monarchy is obviously based on that of ancient Judea which in turn borrowed from the more civilised Egypt. The monarch doubles as head of church and state and on coronation is anointed with oil, the monarchy still commands the armed forces, the Prince of Wales is circumcised according to Jewish ritual and the monarch rules by the Grace of God and is defender of the faith. And there are strong links between Masonry, which sees its roots in the construction of the Temple by Solomon, and the monarchy. And Queen Victoria was a British Israelite, she thought the Anglo-Saxons were descended from a lost tribe. 

As humanity emerged from the long dark night of the Middle Ages, the ideas of religious and monarchical hegemony began to be challenged. Foremost among those doing this important work of demystification and enlightenment was Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, works still full of meaning for today’s troubled world. 

Marxist historians have written about ancient Egypt and Greece. It is high time their incisive dialectical analysis, the materialist conception of history, was fully applied to the ancient Middle East. 

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Literary Walks In Bath, Eleven Excursions in the Company of Eminent Authors. Andrew Swift & Kirsten Elliott. Bath, Akeman Press, 2012. xii & 320pp. Illustrated. Paperback. ISBN 978-9560989-3-1. £15.00. 

Last year I spent a week on holiday in Bath, a picturesque and historic Somerset city whose roots reach back to pre-Roman times, but achieved national, if not international, fame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a spa town, the water of which was reputed to be particularly efficacious, a belief that attracted to the city the great and good, and the not so great and good, all anxious to partake of its water, or be seen in the company of the famous in British society. As well as this side of Bath’s story there is its rich literary heritage, and it is this side of the town’s story on which the authors concentrate. 

Both authors are well qualified to write on the town for they have long experience in conducting walking tours of the city, as well as authoring several other books on it, or aspects of it. Reading this book left me wishing that I had it when I stayed in Bath as it would have made my time there much more rewarding. However, this said, what has it to do with Thomas Paine, who, to my knowledge, never visited it? Well while there is nothing in the book that indicates he ever did, what it also brings to the fore in chapter seven, which is entitled, ‘The Rhythm of Tom Paine’s Bones’, are details of the interest in and reaction locally to Paine’s ideas, as is indicated in the chapter’s sub-heading, “Radicalism and Repression in Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror'”. 

What the chapter relates offers is a tour of the places in the city associated with individuals known for their support either for Paine and/or his ideas. It commences with Henry Hunt, who in 1817 is said to have addressed between twelve and twenty thousand people at a gathering in Orange Grove, though the Bath Chronicle put the figure at five hundred, the purpose of the meeting being to agitate for universal suffrage. 

The military, so the authors note, kept a watchful eye on the crowd but did not, as they also point out, act as they did at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester two years later. Others who were to address meetings in the bath included Henry Vincent the Chartist, who also called for universal suffrage. The authors offer an account of the life of Paine that extends over two pages and includes a portrait of him. This leads to a discussion on Paine’s critic Hannah More, who has a commemorative plaque on a building in Great Pulteney Street, where she had lived. Her attacks on Paine’s ideas are covered in reasonable detail, in the course of which the author’s support for Paine becomes evident, although they make the mistake of calling his book Rights of Man, The Rights of Man. They go on to notice the city prison in Grove Street “where many of Paine’s supporters, and others fighting for their rights ended up”. Details are also given of the numerous occasions near Bath where locals hung or burned Paine in effigy, while membership of the Loyal Bath Association which had a membership of seven thousand, although, they note, that many of those who signed up had done so at the behest of their employers and for them not to have done so would have entailed their dismissal and denunciation to the authorities. 

John Thelwall, who had assisted in the formation of the London Corresponding Society is buried in Bath and details are given as to how to find his grave. The chapter, a truly fascinating and informative read, even if you do not visit the city, also offers an explanation for the chapter’s title, it comes from a song, described as “stirring”, by Graham Moore, “The Rhythm of Tom Paine’s Bones”, though they add the thinking behind the song’s title “is a convoluted and bizarre one. They will by citing a tribute by Robert Ingersoll to Paine and the words of Graham Moore that Paine can still provide inspiration for those fighting new threats to the Rights of Man. 

Those interested in radicals and radicalism will also find the previous chapter: ‘Rebels and Romantics, Catharine Macaulay, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley & Percy Bysshe Shelley’, a productive read. Of those in the title the least known is Catharine Macaulay, and the authors devote considerable coverage to this remarkable woman, a republican, supporter of the American colonists in their struggle for independence, who writing to Washington on events in France, in which she referred to “all friends of Liberty on this side of the Atlantic are now rejoicing for an event which in all probability had been accelerated by the American Revolution”. Mary Wollstonecroft wrote of Catharine Macaulay that she had been the woman of the greatest abilities undoubtedly this country had ever produced. 

Literary Walks in Bath is not a dull repetition of the common place, but a scintillating tour of the city’s literary heritage, and in many respects of Britain’s, doing so in eleven detailed chapters. The authors have as well as a detailed knowledge of their city but an in-depth literary knowledge. They write well and are not beyond humorous anecdotes. It’s a wonderful book from which I emerged with a greater increase in my knowledge on aspects of Britain’s literary heritage than I had before I read it. Do I have any criticism, strangely yes. I would have liked an index.

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If I were granted three wishes, the first would be to be free of the physical ailments and afflictions which blight my life. The second would be to write like Christopher Hitchens and the third would be to write like Thomas Paine Although in our youth we were in rival Trotskyist groups, Hitchens and I share a number of heroes on the Left, the Pole Jacek Kuron, the Trinidadian CLR James and the Russian Victor Serge. We share an interest in George Orwell, although Orwell’s class origins are nearer to those of Hitchens than to mine. And for both of us Thomas Paine is a hero of heroes. 

Both Hitchens and Paine are in that fine tradition of English radical dissent which blasts the pretensions of autocratic rulers and canting priests. Both men were far from teetotal, it was exciting to see the allegedly alcoholic Hitchens lambastes the teetotal Catholic turned advocate of political Islam George Galloway MP. It would have been fascinating to down a glass or two with both men and talk long into the night. 

In his autobiography Hitch 22 Hitchens says little about Paine. He writes: “….I read Thomas Paine saying that to have played a part in two revolutions was to have lived to some purpose. This was the sort of eloquence I wish I could have commanded…” The idea of a time before kings and lords and bishops and priests, says Hitchens, can be found in Paine. 

Paine is dealt with at greater length in God Is Not Great, a work which ranks beside Paine’s Age of Reason as a demolition of religious orthodoxy. Hitchens writes of Paine, “…his memory has outlasted the calumnious rumour that he begged to be reconciled with the church at the end. (The mere fact that deathbed repentances were sought by the godly, let alone subsequently fabricated, speaks volumes about the bad faith of the faith-based).” He reveals that the Calvinist Abolitionist John Brown kept Paine’s works in his camp. 

The magnum opus by Hitchen’s on Paine is Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Perhaps The Independent was indulging in hyperbole when it called Hitchens “a Tom Paine for our troubled times”, but there can be no doubt that he writes eloquently and sympathetically about his subject. 

Although he only got a third class degree from Oxford, his days were spent advocating socialism and his nights partying and swilling champagne with the middle class, Hitchens has a good knowledge of radical history. He writes at length about the Sheffield file maker and poet Joseph Mather. At a time when what Hitchens calls the “Hanoverian usurpation which endures on the British throne to this day” was adopting God Save The King as the national anthem, Mather penned a parody which began ” God save great Thomas Paine.” It is, says Hitchens, taught in no school and sung in no assembly. 

Hitchens discusses the tree of liberty, which Paine’s friend Thomas Jefferson held should be watered with the blood of tyrants. As a radical symbol particularly among the United Irishmen, Rights of Man was translated into Gaelic. He writes that Bums wrote a poem dedicated to the Tree of Liberty, and states that Bums best known poem For ‘a’ That “breathes with a mighty scorn for the conceits of heredity and the heredity principle, so comprehensively lampooned by Paine.” Bums wrote “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, the man’s the gold for ‘a that.” Paine would have echoed this sentiment. 

Of Rights of Man itself Hitchens writes that it is “both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society, both domestically and on the international scene.” 

Hitchens reminds us, as Paine stated, that monarchy has a tendency to over breed and inbreed. The spare children which are many are maintained at the public expense. Hitchens compares Burke’s “tear stained” evocation of Marie Antoinette with the hysteria surrounding the mysterious death of Diana Spencer, also in Paris. Hitchens asks ” which European royal house since 1791 has not lamented , like our very own Windsor’s, the ghastly problem of what to do with the proliferating, subsidized and under- achieving offspring? ” Perhaps they should be sent to doss under London Bridge on one of the government’s make work schemes. 

Chapter 5 of the book by Hitchens discusses Paine’s The Age of Reason, which he sees as a counterpart and completion. Paine 

wrote “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.” Hitchens recounts that when Paine was writing part one of the book he did not have access to a Bible. Hitchens writes: “Paine was an engineer and amateur scientist, and stood on tiptoe to see as far as he could over the existing horizon.” 

Hitchens writes that “Paine was a leading member of that British radical tradition that saw wars and armies as additional burdens on the people, and as reinforcements of existing autocracies. What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation? And what better way to keep unschooled and unemployed serfs in line than give the king’s shilling and put them into uniform… ” Hitchens seemed to endorse this view. He was on the 1966 CND march from Aldermaston. I too was on that march. He came into politics because of his opposition to the Vietnam war being recruited into the International Socialists, the forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers’ Party. The SWP is now an apologist for political Islam. 

Yet by the time of the First Gulf War despite his obvious detestation of George Bush we find Hitchens quoting his fellow Marxist Fred Halliday “You can oppose war, but only by leaving Kuwait in the hands of Saddam…you can be anti-imperialist but you will have to decide if imperialism is worse than fascism” as his defence of what was in essence an imperialist adventure. If Iraq grew carrots rather than produce oil, the West would not have been interested. 

Although he had broken with organised socialism, Hitchens still claimed to be a Marxist; still admired Che and Lenin. He had become an apologist for Western imperialism which differs from Saddam and his Ba’ath Party which disgraces the name of socialism as America disgraces the word democracy, only in quantity not in kind. It is as if Paine had joined the Church of Rome on the grounds it was somewhat better than Lutheranism! 

Hitchens was a man of many unresolved contradictions. How anyone could find Mrs Thatcher sexy is beyond me. And there are far better examples of the distillers’ art than Walker’s Black Label. But if his writing about Paine encourages people to read Paine’s works he will have earned his redemption. 

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When I joined the ranks of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise in 1946, I was quickly made aware of the department’s historic literary tradition, led by Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, Robert Bums and Thomas Paine. But even after nearly 200 years there seemed to be a question mark over the last of these famous men. Paine had twice been dismissed from the service, and was subsequently charged with sedition, prompting his escape to France. Bums, by contrast, appeared to be revered without reserve, though I eventually discovered that during his Excise years he too had found himself in hot water, when some of his writing and activities had called his political loyalty into question. But the two men had much more in common than their time in the service of the Crown. 

There is a substantial academic literature about both Bums and Paine (in the latter case, some of it hostile). Biographies include splendid modem works by Robert Crawford (Bums) and John Keane (Paine), along with a forensic analysis of Burns’ radical tendencies by Liam Mcllvanney. But although both lives have been well chronicled (albeit separately), I hope there may be merit in a short selective account of the most salient features of the common radical ground shared by the two great writers, and its inspiration, a comparison that has attracted scant attention. I will not attempt condensed biographies outside that narrow focus: that would neither be possible, nor necessary. 

Parallels can first be found in their origins and upbringing. Both had working class roots in rural surroundings, environments and experience that inevitably conditioned their views. It is unsurprising that both found resonance in the religious and political dissent of the 18th century. 

Paine’s childhood home was close to Thetford gallows and within the purview of the ruling Grafton family. He could not have failed to be aware of the rough justice handed down to the rural poor and the contrasting privilege and power enjoyed by the landed gentry. In Scotland, Bums knew from his own painful experience the penalties of toil and labour, made futile by poverty. Drudgery and hunger racked his body, but they could not vanquish his spirit, his humour, or his innate genius. The result was, to quote Barke, that “his sympathies were for the poor, the oppressed… He hated all manner of cruelty, oppression and the arrogance of privilege and mere wealth.” 

Likewise, both men, as children, were exposed to religious ideology. In Paine’s case direct evidence is limited, but we know at least that his parents belonged to different branches of the Christian faith – his mother to the established church, his father to the dissenting Quaker sect – and that he had regular contact with the teaching of both traditions. Although never an atheist, it appears from his later writings that he was not persuaded by either theology. He said in The Age of Reason: “from the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by reflection, I either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair.” But more important than the influence of parental indoctrination is the evidence of Paine’s voluntary association with Methodism. There is a record that he heard John Wesley preach on one of his several visits to Thetford. Later, as a 21 year-old, he is said to have preached as a Methodist in both Dover and Sandwich. Eight years later, while in London waiting for an Excise vacancy, he is said to have again turned to occasional preaching. There is even a suggestion in the Oldys biography (repeated by Conway) that Paine sought from the Baptist minister Daniel Noble an introduction to the Bishop of London with a view to ordination. It is certainly reasonable to think that Methodism appealed to Paine. Its preachers were enthusiastic and able to reach out to the common people. They emphasised that Christ died for all, and their message, although concerned with spiritual salvation, was in tune with the 18th century radical aspiration towards equality. Notwithstanding Paine’s later assault upon organised religion and his repudiation of the Bible, Keane’s view “that his moral capacities ultimately had religious roots” is very persuasive. 

Bums was baptized and brought up in the Christian faith. His father William, a strict Calvinist, was committed to his sons’ religious education, though the tone of it was somewhat tempered by the preaching of his parish minister. William Dalrymple was of the Presbyterian persuasion: a moderate, liberal man, antagonistic to divisive sectarianism, zealotry and hypocrisy, concerned to reach out to the poor, and an advocate of amity and love. Although Bums later strayed from his father’s model of piety and virtue 

(particularly in his sexual inclinations: according to Berke he had passionate relationships with many women, productive of fifteen children, six out of wedlock) this early teaching was later reflected in many of his poems. And despite his departure from the constraints of Presbyterian theology, he never relinquished his belief in God. Crawford notices a manual written by Bums’s father addressing some of the fundamental questions of religious belief. One of these not only conditioned his children but, as I will mention later, was also very much in line with Paine’s thinking: 

Q. How shall I evidence to myself that there is a God? 

A. By the works of Creation; for nothing can make itself and this fabrick of nature demonstrates its creator to be possessed of all possible perfection, and for that cause we owe all that we have to him.

Similar parallels apply to the relatively brief formal education of the two writers. At the age of seven, Paine was fortunate to gain a place at Thetford Grammar School, but left when only twelve to serve for the next seven years as an apprentice in his father’s business as a maker of stays. But as a young man, over time, he cultivated the friendship of a number of distinguished men: the Scottish astronomer and instrument maker, James Ferguson, destined to become a Fellow of the Royal Society; the well-known lexicographer and optical instrument maker, Benjamin Martin; the celebrated astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. John Bevis; the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, and crucially the influential Benjamin Franklin, whose support helped Paine to establish himself in America. During his time in London he extended his reading, and met like-minded people who were challenging orthodox theology and the concept of top-down government. He was introduced, as Keane puts it, “to a new culture of political radicalism that rejected throne and altar”, and experienced a long- term conversion to republican democracy.” 

Burns’s first formal education was even shorter, spent between the ages of six and nine in a local school at Alloway Mill, before having to leave to help on his father’s isolated farm at Mount Oliphant. He was, however, fortunate through those years in having a young, inspirational teacher, John Murdoch, who before his departure to Dumfries imparted a thorough grounding in the technicalities of language, with an expectation far wider than was customary for children of such tender years. This, combined with Bums’s voracious and wide-ranging reading, established a literary disposition that would prosper against the grain of physical labour and frugal living on the land. Much credit for that is also due to Bums’s father. Despite the necessity of setting his sons to farming, William Burnes contrived to continue their education at home, conversing with them as adults, and procuring books for them designed both to nurture their faith and spur their imaginations. It was fortunate, too, that in 1772 Murdoch returned to teach at another school in Ayr and was concerned enough to find time to sustain intermittent contact with the Bums brothers in pursuit of their development. Unlike Paine, Bums could not yet add personal acquaintance with leading intellectuals, but he did so at second- hand, gleaning counsel from literature, not least Arthur Masson’s Collection of English Prose and Verse and John Newbury’s anthology of letter-writers of distinguished merit. 

In 1777 the family moved to Lochlea. There, although still committed to hard labour in the fields, Bums was not without friends. As he reached manhood he found particular inspiration among the Masons of Tarbolton, warming to their principles of friendship, benevolence and religious toleration. But the final shaping of Burns’s muse was forged in the depths of adversity. His problems during 1782 to 1784 have been well documented: a business venture that literally disappeared in flames; a breakdown of mind and body; the failing family farm, with the prospect of utter destitution; his father’s legal struggle in the face of a writ of sequestration. Bums’s response, as Crawford puts it, was to write his way out of it. Surrounded by deep recession and gloom across rural Scotland, he fixed upon ideals that would underpin his later poetry: dignity in poverty and admiration for men of independent minds, prepared to reject the lure of wealth and position. In 1783 he began his ‘Commonplace Book’, and gradually his identity as a ploughman gave way to that of a poet and the emergence of his distinctive style and language. By the following year he had come to think that he might be capable of exposing his work to a wider public. And among many strands of his eager imagination were political ideas drawn from his harsh, personal experience that were pointedly radical in their day. 

The legal action against Bums’s father was decided in his favour in January 1784. By then, however, he was exhausted and ill, dying a few weeks later. Throughout the travails of their lives at Lochlea, Bums and his brother had respected their father dearly. But his death and release from debt, allowed a move to Mossgiel, a new beginning, a freer lifestyle and the burgeoning of Robert’s romantic poetry. 

Quite when Paine moved from personal conviction to written advocacy remains unclear. More than once he insisted that he wrote nothing in England, though appearances suggest otherwise. What is certain is that in January 1775, having overcome a serious illness picked up on the voyage to America, he was taken on as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Articles and poems in this new periodical and in William Bradford’s earlier Pennsylvania Journal appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms, but it is generally accepted that Paine was the author of a number of them, including a broadside against slavery, an exposure of cruelty to animals, and a plea for women’s rights. The battle of Lexington in April 1775 stirred him to give vent to increasingly radical views about British tyranny, and to consider the necessity of using force to secure human liberty. In July 1775 he penned a song Liberty Tree, the final verses of which were unequivocal in their call for revolution: 

But hear, 0 ye swains (`tis a tale most profane).

How all the tyrannical pow’rs,

King, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain’

To cut down this guardian of ours;

From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms,

Through the land let the sound of it flee:

Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,

In defense of our Liberty Tree.

In the Journal of October 1775, Paine (as Humanus) followed this with an article headed A Serious Thought in which he reflected on the barbarities wrought by Britain, particularly the importation of negroes for sale. He declared that he would “hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain”. 

His direct, terse and incisive prose appealed to the common citizen, and found its most positive expression with the publication, in January 1776, of his seminal pamphlet Common Sense. I need not recapitulate the arguments of this famous text, save to notice that its opening pages drew on ingrained tenets of English radicalism, with an insistence on natural rights to liberty and a vision of a new world order. Its impact was, of course, dramatic and a major factor in setting the course in favour of the war of independence. 

Chronologically, Burn’s literary debut came ten years later, with the publication in July 1786 of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the so-called Kilmarnock edition). Bums was then only 27, some ten years younger than Paine had been at the time of his first Pennsylvania articles. The collection was a chosen, wide-ranging miscellany of 36 poems, verses, songs, odes and dirges, previously written alongside his farming at Mossgiel. One reviewer thought the love poems “execrable”, and most critics regretted that they were written in some measure in “an unknown tongue” which limited their audience to a small circle. But there was general recognition of Bums as “a native genius”. He was seen as the ‘ploughman poet; a phenomenon bursting from the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life”. Yet in all this, only two reviewers briefly mentioned occasional “libertine” tendencies, dismissed as regrettable but excusable in the light of his origins. 

In fact, the edition contained three overtly political poems, written shortly before publication: The Twa Dogs, A Dream, and The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer. Like all the other pieces, they pre-dated Burns’s Excise service, and, according to his Preface, had not been “composed with a view to the press°. Nevertheless, one can perhaps detect a note of caution in Bums’s approach. He commonly made a virtue of his low social standing and used the paradox of a simple bard appealing to a refined audience. 

The Twa Dogs is a gem. Briefly, the dogs are represented as friendly observers of the lives of their keepers: one a local dignitary, the other a ploughman. The poem, masterly crafted, contrasts the pleasure-seeking, self-interest and dissipation of the gentry (leaving aside “some exceptions”) with the destitution and toil faced by the poor, who nevertheless, in their respite from labour, find joy in the simple, frugal, common recreations of rural life: 

A countra fellow at the pleugh,

His acre’s till’d, he’s right enough;

A countra girl at her wheel,

Her dizzen’s done, she’s unco weel;

But gentlemen, an’ ladies warst,

Wi’ ev’n down want o’work are curst

They loiter, lounging, lank an’ lazy;

Though deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy:

Their days insipid, dull an’ tasteless;

Their nights unquiet, lang an restless.

A Dream began with a vindicatory preamble:

Thoughts, words and deeds, the Statute blames with reason; But

surely Dreams were ne’re indicted Treason.

Bums went on to pretend that he had fallen asleep after reading Thomas Warton’s Laureate’s Ode for His Majesty’s Birthday, 4 June 1786, and in his dreaming fancy had imagined his own, alternative address. It was a daring device, for whereas Warton’s ode had lavishly flattered George III, Bums’ satire made it clear that he would do no such thing, but instead addressed the king with mock reverence, feigning loyalty while favouring defection, reminding him of the embarrassment of the loss of the American colonies and the failures of his ministers. He hoped that the King might wring corruption’s neck, and reduce the burden of taxation: levied till ‘old Britain’ was fleeced until she had ‘scarce a tester’ (an old Scots silver coin of small value). A cloak of pretended adulation and a representation of being but a humble poet might not normally have been enough to escape dire retribution, but Bums destiny appears somehow to have been charmed. 

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer was addressed to the Right Honourable and Honourable Scotch representatives in the House of Commons. Bums again began with mock deference: To you a simple Bardie’s prayers are humbly sent. But thereafter his 25 stanzas and postscript of a further seven were unmistakably critical: an ironic blast against the 45 Scottish members, apparently supine in the face of legislation to increase the duties on whisky:

In gath’rin votes you were na slack;

Now stand as tightly by your tack:

Ne’er claw your lug, an’ fidge your back,

An’ hum and haw;

But raise your arm, an’ tell your crack

Before them a’.

He followed this with a swipe at those whose ranks he would shortly join: 

“damn’d excisemen in a bustle”! 

But his main thrust was aimed at the liaison of Scottish and English members, which he clearly saw as an unholy alliance: 

Yon mixtie-maxtie, queer hotch-potch, The Coalition.

An opinion that, albeit in a different context, has a certain resonance today. 

In 1787, though written in 1784, a further political offering appeared in a second expanded edition of Bums’s poems, published in Edinburgh. This was a ballad conveying his thoughts on the American Revolution. Aware that it might be thought “rather heretical”, he had decided not to publish it in the Kilmarnock edition, but later, with the advice of Lord Glencaim and Henry Erskine, caused it to be included in the new edition. Whereas Paine, in 1776, had fomented the war of independence, and throughout had continued to support it in eight issues of The Crisis (the last in April 1783), Bums now reflected, after its conclusion, on the tide of events. Though the facts were no doubt gleaned from other sources, it remains a brilliant and witty summary of the hapless record of Britain’s generals and politicians, remarkable for having been constructed alongside the drudgery of Bums’s ordinary occupation. 

For some years Bums added almost nothing to his political output. To make ends meet, he joined the Excise service as a common gauger, receiving his commission in 1788 and starting work in September 1789. Like myself, a condition of appointment required a pledge of allegiance to the monarch. While his poetic output was undiminished, he was now on the whole careful either to avoid contentious political issues or to try to ensure that controversial material did not appear over his name. 

Not so Paine, who was in Paris during the winter of 1789-90, seeing for himself and documenting the beginnings of the popular revolution. In January 1790 he wrote enthusiastically to his friend Edmund Burke, intimating that the French Revolution was “certainly a forerunner to other revolutions in Europe”. The reaction from Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution, was unexpected. We now know that he had already been mightily disturbed by Dr Richard Price’s address A Discourse of the Love of Our Country, given at the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789. Rather than welcoming the new revolutionary movement, Burke denounced it in his vitriolic Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November1790. This drew from Paine his famous response, Rights of Man, published in two parts, brought together in February 1792, drawing inspiration from France and making the case for the government of the people. Despite huge sales (in Britain alone, 200,000 by 1793), public opinion was divided. Those who ached for reform saw the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens as a most desirable model for Britain; many had found in the American Revolution a prospect for change, and in the French uprising a hope that a new politics might flourish in Europe. Whereas Burke, along with the government and entrenched conservative opinion, viewed the events across the Channel with alarm, dreading the possibility of civil resistance and copycat disturbances; the more so as violence and vengeance escalated in Paris. In May 1792 George III issued a Royal Proclamation against sedition, subversion and riot. In September, Paine, indicted to stand trial on a charge of promulgating seditious libel, and under constant harassment, escaped to France. He was, of course, later tried in his absence, found guilty, and vilified by the ruling establishment. 

Burns was undoubtedly aware of the furore created by Paine’s pamphlet, and sympathetic to the reformist view; but also acutely conscious that as a government officer, needing the salary that went with the job, he must not parade his sentiments. He was careful to require that his poems should bear his name only with his agreement. However, on 30 October 1792 this show of neutrality was severely tested. In the newly opened Theatre Royal at Dumfries, with friends, he was in the pit for a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, also attended by some of Scotland’s elite. When at the end of the play God Save the King was called for, there were shouts from the pit for ca ira, the song of the French revolutionaries. Scuffles accompanied the singing of the national anthem, through all of which Exciseman Burns remained in his seat. 

There could be no real doubt as to where Bums’s heart lay. Four weeks later he wrote to Louise Fontenelle, a touring London actress he admired, offering her an ‘occasional address’ to use on her benefit night on 26 November. The Rights of Woman, published anonymously in The Edinburgh Gazetter on 30 November, all too obviously echoed that of Paine’s notorious, inspirational text. Harmlessly, Burns extolled female rights as those of protection, decorum and admiration; far more interesting, however, are the lines with which he topped and tailed his thoughts:

While Europe’s eye is ftx’d on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

When awful Beauty joins with all her charms,

Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?

But truce with kings, and truce with constitutions,

With bloody armaments and revolutions,

Let Majesty your first attention summon:

Ah! Ca ira! The Majesty of Woman!

As the year drew to its close, and Burns became more confident of what he believed to be the impending triumph of the British reform movement, he was quite unable to restrain his feelings, giving vent to a ballad, Here’s a Health to Them That’s Awa. This unreservedly raised a series of toasts to reformers over the border. Its message was undisguised:

May Liberty meet wi’ success’

May Prudence protect her frae evil!

May tyrants and Tyranny tine i’ the mist

And wander their way to the Devil!

Here’s freedom to them that wad read,

Here’s freedom to them that would write!

There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard

But they whom the truth would indite!

And wha wad betray old Albion’s right,

May they never eat of her bread!

Sadly, Burns’s optimism was misplaced. Doubts about his loyalty had been brought to the notice of the Excise Commissioners, who promptly launched an inquiry. Learning of the Board’s misgivings, and fearful of the consequences, Burns wrote on 31 December 1792 to one of the Excise commissioners, Robert Graham of Fintry, to assure him that any such allegation was unfounded, in that he was devoutly attached to the British Constitution “on Revolution principles [i.e the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’], next after his God”. Remarkably, Graham promptly responded on 5 January to reassure Bums that his job was safe. And, by return, Bums then replied to the specific allegations, admitting that he had at first been an `senthusiastic votary” of the French Revolution, but had altered his sentiments when France came to show her old avidity for conquest. Some writers have judged that the tone of Bums’ letters was contrite, even abject; that effectively he renunciated his reformist stance. This is certainly the feeling they convey on first reading; but Mcllvanney makes a convincing case that on closer analysis there was no apostasy and no apology. 

Yet the detail of all this is perhaps beside the point: it seems obvious that what kept Bums in his job was his high artistic reputation and good standing, based on the fame his poetry, then as now largely focused on its sentimental, urbane and apolitical content. He was fortunate to have a number of friends and supporters in high places, not least Graham; a relationship that may fairly be judged from a ballad of 1790, which opens with the lines: 

Fintry, my stay in worldly strife, 

Friend o’ my Muse, friend o’ my life, 

The brush with authority has attracted microscopic attention, and certainly made Bums anxious for his future. But it must also be seen in the context of explicit violent agitation in France, where, exactly at this time, Paine was in Paris, passionately — but unsuccessfully – seeking to convince his fellow deputies of the National Convention that Louis XVI should be spared the guillotine. 

The Excise inquiry reminded Bums of the dangerous ground of radical poetry. Indeed, with the execution of Louis on the 21 January 1793 and the French declaration of war on Britain on 1 February, the reform movement as a whole was forced to wake up to the perils of open defiance. For the time being the State’s policy was one of such severe repression as to drive radical opposition into hiding. But at the time of the dramatic Scottish sedition trials of August 1793, Bums could no longer contain his feelings. He ventured three poems, based on the legendary heroics of Robert Bruce, all of which carried parallels, for those who could see them, to the then contemporary challenges to Scottish liberty; as Mcllvanney puts it “the tendency to view one struggle for liberty through the optic of another.” The most famous of the three, sent to trusted friends and published anonymously in The Morning Chronicle on 8 May 1794, is Scots Wha Hae, with its stark call to resist “chains and slavery° Unambiguously, through the words of Bruce, it brings the challenge into Burns’ own time – “Now’s the day, and now’s the hour”- and ends with the appeal from the lips of Bruce: 

Lay the proud usurpers lowl 

Tyrants fall in every foe! 

Liberty’s in every blow! 

Let us do, or die! 

Bums followed this up with an Ode for George Washington’s Birthday, comparing the liberty achieved in America with the political suppression imposed from London. Although he could not then openly publicise his views, this clarion call now reveals the strength of his true feelings: 

But come, ye sons of Liberty, 

Columbia’s offspring, brave as free, 

In danger’s hour still flaming in the van, 

Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man! 

Here Bums is no longer the humble bard; there can be no mistaking the contemporary relevance of his historical allusions. 

By this time, Paine had written the first part of his passionate but controversial essay The Age of Reason: being an investigation of true and fabulous theology. The astonishing story of how he took up the subject while fearing for his life is too well known to need repetition; indeed the prefaces to the first and second parts of the eventual book, separated by his incarceration in the Luxembourg prison, largely describe the perilous circumstances that attended its completion and survival. The French Revolution had turned sour. The libertarian principles that had marked its beginning had given way to bloody retribution. Paine, whose name was on the death list, had for many years intended to express his opinions on religion, and felt that he now had no time to lose. Part one appeared during February 1794, and part two, expanding his first thoughts, came out in October 1795. Together they presented the reader with a double paradox: firstly, the essays unequivocally repudiated belief in the Bible as the authentic ‘Word of God’, but by no means repudiated God; secondly, though despising the purveyors and apparatus of organised religion, there was also a recognition that the eradication of Christianity in favour of a revolutionary dogma of equality and liberty could lead the French state towards atheism. As Paine explained at the beginning of his first essay: 

The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. 

As usual, Paine wrote with clarity and raw honesty, appealing to reason. He saw the Old Testament as “a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales”, and the so-called ‘New’ Testament as being of doubtful provenance, lacking authenticity, heaping hearsay upon hearsay, and replete with irrational, fabulous inventions and contradictions. While not doubting the existence of Jesus Christ, he regarded him as merely “a virtuous and an amiable man”. On a questionable base of “wild and visionary doctrine”, the church had “set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears…a religion of pomp and revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.” Nor was this type of construction limited to Christianity. Every national church or religion “had established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals”, each with books which they call ‘revelation’, or the word of God. 

Paine’s own belief was simpler. He believed “in one God, and no more” and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He expressed belief in the equality of man, and argued that religious duties consisted of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. He saw God as the compassionate creator, evidenced by creation, whose choicest gift was the gift of reason. In the first part of the essay there is a particularly interesting passage: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

Paine’s polemic excited huge interest, reinforcing those of a radical persuasion, but surely making more enemies than friends. Crucially, in Britain, those in gilded positions in the liaison of established church and state chose to see it only as an assault on cherished beliefs and values, a threat to good order and their own positions. Some, who cannot have read the essays, dubbed Paine an atheist. This he emphatically was not, but he undoubtedly provided his opponents with ammunition to confirm in their eyes his reputation as a disreputable trouble-maker. 

Those who had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of a new age clung tenaciously to its original thinking in pursuit of liberty. In 1795, Bums, though still employed in the Excise (acting- up as supervisor at Dumfries), and having felt duty-bound to enlist in the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, nevertheless contrived to write his most celebrated political song. Popularly known as A Man’s a Man for a’ that, it first appeared anonymously in the Glasgow Magazine of August 1795. James Barke, in his edition of Bums’ poems and songs, has aptly described it as “the Marseillaise of humanity”. Disparaging the ‘tinsel show” of rank and title, Bums extols the merits of the honest man of independent mind. As others have noticed, the short verses echo the sentiments of Paine’s Rights of Man, while Marilyn Butler has pointed out that the closing lines closely follow the letter and spirit of the revolutionary song ca Ira!: 

Then let us pray that come it may 

(As come it will for a’ that) 

That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth 

Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, It’s comin yet for a’ that, 

That man to man the world o’er 

Shall brothers be for a’ that 

Paine struggled on until 1809, adding a number of less well-known studies to his archive, and at the last declining an attempt to have him accept Christ as the Son of God. Bums, like Paine, never surrendered his belief in a benevolent God. He died in 1796, still impoverished but a radical exciseman to the last. There is nothing to suggest that the two men ever met, but there may yet be one unremarked final parallel. Another version of The Liberty Tree, although never quite proved to be the work of Bums, bears the hallmarks of his style. Here then, to close, are the last two verses of eleven:

Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow

The wand would live in peace, man.

The sword would help to mak’ a plough,

The din o’ war wad cease, man,

Like brethren in a common cause,

We’d on each other smile, man:

And equal rights and equal laws

Wad gladden every isle, man.

Wae worth the loon wha wadna eat

Sic halesome, dainty cheer, man!

I’d gie the shoon frae aff my feet

To taste the fruit o’t here, man!

Syne let us pray, Auld England may

Sure plant this far-famed tree, man:

And blythe we’ll sing, and herald the day

That gives us liberty, man.

Sources:

• James Barke (ed.): Poems and Songs of Robert Bums (Collins, 1960)
• James A Mackay: A Biography of Robert Burns (Mainstream, 1992)
• Robert Crawford: The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Pimlico, 2009)
• Liam Mcllvanney: Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Tuckwell Press, 2002)
• And, of course, the works of Paine and Burns referred to in the text.

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